The Ball : Pehua Announced

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hal

hal

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The Ball : Pehua is a brand new modification for Unreal Tournament 3. Lots of talent behind this one, including Hourences, DGUnreal, RenderMonkey, and SolidSnake. Best of all, we should see a first release next weekend!

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.
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U

UBerserker

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Ah, this was the thing about the ball that Houry talked about in a thread. Looks awesome indeed.
 
Clawfist

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Looks and sounds interesting, love the simple shapes! The generic blue emissive light fixtures totally kill the aztec atmosphere for me tho. At least make them look like some sort of m4g1c gemstone/crystal or give the material a little more detail besides a constant in the emissive channel, like a glowing aztec rune or something.

Oh and I absolutely despise the current BU image viewer :)
 
U

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TBH. When I see game-design talents like the above team up, I will reinstall UT3 just for this.

:)
 
Hourences

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Clawfist said:
Looks and sounds interesting, love the simple shapes! The generic blue emissive light fixtures totally kill the aztec atmosphere for me tho. At least make them look like some sort of m4g1c gemstone/crystal or give the material a little more detail besides a constant in the emissive channel, like a glowing aztec rune or something.

Oh and I absolutely despise the current BU image viewer :)
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Its actually a crystal, gem like, but its so bright that you cant see much of its octagonal structure anymore:/
Will look into it.
I need the blue lights because I cant do it with just orange torches all over the place.
 
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Clawfist

Clawfist

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Hourences said:
Its actually a crystal, gem like, but its so bright that you cant see much of its octagonal structure anymore:/
Will look into it.
I need the blue lights because I cant do it with just orange torches all over the place.
Click to expand...

Oh yeah totally, maybe breaking up the perfect geometric shape of them and randomizing that a bit to make it look more rough/organic would help.
 
dub

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Feb 12, 2002
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Clawfist said:
Doesn't actually load the pictures for me 70% of the time and I have to keep refreshing the page to be able to see them eventually. But maybe that's IE's fault *shrug*
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hmm, I'm using FF and it works flawlessly.

NegativeTrend said:
So kinda like a Metaball for UT3?
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What I first thought, but if you look at the description, it's as much like Metaball as bombing run is.
 
TheSpoonDog

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Doesn't actually load the pictures for me 70% of the time and I have to keep refreshing the page to be able to see them eventually. But maybe that's IE's fault *shrug*
Click to expand...
I use FireFox and I have the same problem - think it may have something to do with bandwidth. When I try to open a bunch of links in different tabs, and one of them is a BU pic, then it'll just show a page with a bunch of URLs for the pics. But if I wait until the other tabs are done loading and refresh the page, then the pic works.

I was on 56k recently aswell and basically could not view any BU images without pasting links into the address bar manually :/

Can't say I'm a fan of it either, seems like feature creep :p Especially the way attached pics in a thread open up now... don't like that at all. Wonder if that can be disabled...

And sorry, back to the mod, looks interesting - hope the puzzles are well thought out. I wonder who made that map ;)
 
IceCreamYou

IceCreamYou

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I really like the image thing...

Anyway, here's what Hourences had to say about this mod compared to Metaball:

Hourences said:
There are a dozen games like Metaball, they are all derived from each other. Switchball for example, Marble mania kind of as well, and so on. The element they all share is the ball yeah, but to me it's closer to Portal than to all those ball puzzle games like metaball.

I usually don't really like those typical ball puzzle games because you have so little control over the ball, and usually you just roll yourself into a hole somewhere.. My approach is to give the player a standard fps character, of which he has maximum control, and have the character mess with the ball. If the ball ends up in a hole or some lava, big deal, just pull it back out. HL2 Gravity gun meets tomb raider meets portal meets metaball.

Most ball games are usually also quite bright, cartoony, and childish. Mine will be dark, slightly less cartoony, and a bit more mature. I dont have the time and manpower to fully develop the theme and background story right now, but the original idea was to have some bloody action bits, which would also be quite satisfactionary btw, killing monsters with a big ball, and some scary elements like a mummified creature that "lives" inside the ball you are playing with.

We are starting simple though..
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