Orb Ball Devlog 1

I’ve been working on a game for about a year, tentatively called Orb Ball. I’m going to try publishing weekly, casual progress posts. I’ll grab whatever scraps I have lying around, screenshots or notes or gifs, and talk through them a bit, and write up a changelog too.

What even is Orb Ball?

Here are some words: Orb Ball is a tactical dark fantasy PvP sports autobattler. I’m making it with help from my brother Taos, who is making all the art, and lots of input from a small group of friends and family. Here’s the first ever sketch I made for the idea, which I had while watching a polo match and thinking about a) how weird polo is and b) how all sports are basically the same with slight variations:

Right now it looks like this, maybe 50% of the way toward how I want it to look:

Orb Ball will eventually run on phones and computers. If all goes well, you’ll be able to play it in any browser, or in Steam, or in the iOS store.

Why am I making Orb Ball?

In lots of ways I’m making this game as a reaction to Wilderplace. With Wilderplace, I made a work of art that you can experience like a book or movie - you finish it, then move on with your life.

I’m making Orb Ball because I want to make a game I can play with my brothers, who are all gamers, indefinitely. The way we play Smash Bros or Warcraft III together. I figure if it’s fun for us, it’ll be fun for more people. This is a dangerous kind of game to make because it’s dramatically harder to design and engineer, and it’s more complex ethically. Am I stealing time that could be spent on more life-affirming activities? Are games actually one of the most life-affirming things to spend time doing? I’m not sure. I think these are fun problems to have, so I embrace the danger.

Wilderplace was made by the version of me who studied painting at a liberal arts college and felt like I had something to prove as an artist. Orb Ball is being made by the version of me that spent a childhood playing games with friends for hours and not regretting it.

Weekly scraps

Most of these notes will make very little sense because the game is not yet live, and I don’t even have a website that lays out the rules. But let them wash over you.

This week I redesigned goals. They used to be glowing circles on the field because I had been putting off thinking about an in-universe explanation for goals. Now goals are magical breeding pools where a larva gets violently transformed into a beast that then attacks the opponent’s Lord:

Should make it a bit more satisfying to score. We’re in the process of totally redoing all the lord art, and redesigning the lord mechanics – should be ready in a week or two.

This is boring, but Orb Ball has accounts now. I’ve been playtesting for months with no persistence of any kind. Set up a database and a basic account model this week. We even track match history, pick rates, and a few other metrics! Working toward a proper matchmaking system.

I’ve been rebalancing the economy a bit. The game has two resources: Materia, which is sort of like ‘food’, and Anima, which is sort of like ‘gold’. Materia is a cap, Anima is the thing you spend each round. For a while creatures had very low Anima costs and high Materia costs, but players still just always bought the strongest creatures. I increased anima costs on higher power creatures to help support a bit more variety. Also: I wanted to share this screenshot because it illustrates something important about my approach: I hate designing with spreadsheets. All my design tuning happens in data files in the repo, and then I get to build visualizations like this that look exactly how I want. It would probably be more efficient to just use spreadsheets.

One more thing: the physics / movement simulation at the core of Orb Ball is very complicated. I’m still trying to get the details right so it feels intuitive and strategic. The exact mechanics of tackles have been hard to nail down. Orb Ball tackles are somewhere between Tecmo Bowl tackles and RTS fights – locked targeting, but a bunch of ways to break the lock. I had a ‘double team’ mechanic where if 2 creatures ever targeted 1 other creature, that 1 creature was instantly stunned. It overly rewarded massing small units, so I decided to tweak it.

Changes

The game has about 5 players right now, so this changelog is for you brave testers (Join the discord if you want to join in):

Balance

• Lizard lord no longer starts with Toadman, swapped to Brute.
• Increased anima costs of higher tier creatures.
• Leaper speed 6 → 5.
• Dragon attack range 4 → 4.5.

Mechanics

• Lords now have random starting Obelisks.
• Reworked tackle mechanics.
• Better defender behavior closing on target.
• Ball carrier pursues goals more directly.
• First draft of birthing-pool (“larva orb”) scoring design.

Visuals

• Lord portraits react to possession changes and goals.
• HP bars moved below creatures’ feet and only appear after receiving damage.
• Add white damage flash on creature KO.
• Animate terrain changes in & out.
• Update rock obstacle sprites so they better match hitboxes.

UI

• Added multi-touch camera gestures for pinch zoom, two-finger tilt, double-tap zoom.

Accounts & backend

• Completely overhauled the API codebase.
• Persistent accounts + account stats and account page.
• Match history tracking.
• Made matches more efficient by no longer running full simulation every round server side: now we compare client checksums against each other.

Notable bug fixes

• Fixed a bug where Orb carriers would not run toward goals properly if they were being chased by a similar speed threat.
• Don’t end overtime mid-pass if possession won’t change.

Guess what? You can play Orb Ball very soon!

All you have to do is Join the discord – I’ll be organizing some test matches as soon as next week.