The Ball : Pehua Announced!

I have been working on my own little mod together with DGUnreal as the programmer, and RenderMonkey as the Kismet scripter, and some additional programming help from SolidSnake.

We hope to have this done in time for MSU phase 1, with a possible first release next weekend if all goes well.

The Ball : Pehua (Pehua : the beginning) is a singleplay FPS puzzle game involving the player and a big metal ball. The player must push the ball around, currently using a modified impact hammer, to get around puzzles and obstacles.
The game takes place in an Aztec temple, inside a gigantic cavern in the top of an volcano.

It is basically Portal meets Tomb Raider in terms of feeling, atmosphere, action/puzzle ratio and all that.

The idea was to make a puzzle game with a darker edge to it. Most puzzle and ball games are usually quite cartoony and kiddy, we are trying to go for a slightly darker yet still rather colorful (Unreal!) style.

Pehua is part one, if this part is received well, we will continue to expand the mod with part two, Oztoc (In the Cave), and so on. In future versions we also intend to add more action orientated gameplay with some simple enemies, to speed up gameplay and make it more catchy, and to give more attention to the background story with some intro dialogs.

But for now, we are starting simple.

It would be pretty hard to transform the theme into Na Pali at this point, and besides it already looks like it a little. Its quite unrealish, its pretty low poly, its dark and indoor, and there are lots of colors. I think you will all like the atmosphere and music of the place. It feels mysterious and a bit scary.

We are not making the planned weekend release because like always, things take longer than expected, but the good news is that we are pretty close to a beta now. There are 15 issues left, and 13 of those are really easy to fix.

The mod will be about 130 MB large, and this first release has about an hour of singleplay gametime I am guessing.

Video released - first minute of the game!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKziQoBNy4U

There is one jumppad at the moment but it is quite a simple one. I figured that in-air-smashing-ball thing out too, so we will likely expand that in the future

Oh and there is a low grav room too.

Yeah there is a lot of potential. It is difficult finding things that are doable though without lots of new code. We dont have a trap you can stop with the ball yet, but it will likely be added in the future
The first level is a bit of introduction area, there is a bit of everything to introduce all the types of environments. So 1 low grav room, 1 jumppad thing, etc.
Its certainly also the intention to add things like mummies and arrow turrets later on, which would also do well in adding tension and urgency.

I believe it is done!
We are going to spend another day on final testing, but we have all solved all problems we believe.

And once cooked, the mod is only just over 30 MB big!