I have the pleasure to announce: the playable release of Puzzle Balls is out! Go ahead, play it! Prepare your arrow keys and space bar, and connect 3 or more; fullscreen recommended!

Puzzle Balls early release gameplay preview

The game is not developed only by me. I collaborate with a dear friend of mine, MichaΕ‚ HoΕ‚owaty.

Keep in mind it’s a very early release. There is not much depth to the gameplay, plus many assets are just a placeholder, and many features are in the early stages. Although the game is fully functional and can be highly addictive! You have been warned!

We keep having fun playing and developing the game, so save the link in your bookmarks and come back to it once in a while. You are likely to encounter new features soon!

What happened to American Football Manager?

I forwent my previous game project – (American) Football Manager. It was dragging too much. Instead, I decided to cooperate with my friend on a new project, using an actual game development engine – Unity.

What is a real game-changer with Unity is that you can see something moving on the screen from day 1. Even if it was just a moving circle, it was our circle. Our child. And it was much more than artifacts from American Football Manager, written in TDD in pure Ruby.

How do I like Unity?

With that project, a lot was new for me. New language (C#, the first in years that is statically typed), actual game platform (Unity). Even version control was new – Unity recommends its own Plastic SCM instead of git.

Let me tell you, I learned a lot. Mostly programming, but not only. Unity is a fascinating intersection of code and non-code. Starting a project puts you in the middle of physics, maths, scene design, ECS, graphics, textures, and all that jazz. Every day you have to learn something new. But old habits die hard – things I dug deep into really hard were programming. Namely, automated tests and Dependency Injection.

What’s next?

The development is far from over – we have a huge backlog of things to add + heads full of ideas. But regardless, we decided to go for a Release 0. It’s completed to an extent, fully playable, and highly addictive.

By the way, my personal high score is 2215. Can you beat me?