Gravity Ball

Gravity Ball is a simple game I made over a weekend while in college.  The goal is simple:  Keep the ball on the screen for as long as possible.  It bounces off objects in the field, off the walls and ceilings, and off of your paddle - which you can tilt left and right to alter the angle at which it bounces.  Points accumulate over time.  You have five "lifeline" bumpers covering parts of the bottom of the screen, that will help prevent your ball from falling... Once.  The upside to this, is that for every bumper you lose, you gain 100% more points per second, adding a risk vs. reward scenario in an otherwise very simplistic game.

Download for Windows XP or higher.




Game Designer

For this project, I had several design goals:  First, I wanted to make a project that is simple, yet fun.  The time allotted to work on this project was one week, so keeping the game simple is paramount.  At the same time, I wanted the game to actually have some challenge to it; challenge, after all, serves to make games more fun, by instituting the chance of failure into the game.

Those in mind, I designed Gravity Ball:  A simple game where your objective is to keep the ball in the air as long as possible.  The player controls a paddle at the bottom of the screen that they can use to bounce the ball back upward.  By making some interesting geometry in the playing field, the player will have to deal with all sorts of different ricochets the ball may make.  Because of this, I added the ability to tilt the paddle as well, allowing for some more precise control over where you bounce the ball - in addition to where the ball hits the paddle being taken into account.

However, I wanted to implement a new measure for challenging players in the game, and I came up with a novel solution:  Across the bottom of the screen, below the player's paddle, there are a series of bumpers off of which the ball can bounce, in sort of a last-ditch line of defense.  These bumpers disappear after a single use - so any one used by a player is gone for the remainder of the game.  Now, this adds some leeway for making mistakes, but I thought, "Why not let players intentionally hit and get rid of these, and award them with points?"

So I decided that for every one of these bumpers the player has lost, the points they accumulate over time will increase by 100% (double points with one gone, triple points with two gone, etc.).  To players not seeking a challenge, this is simply a little bonus for them.  However, when players want to pursue a risk vs. reward scenario, they may aim for intentionally getting rid of as many of these bumpers as possible, in order to maximize the amount of points they gain.

Though a very simple game, with a very simple scoring gimmick to it, I believe it was a critical success in its own right:  By taking a very simple kind of game, and adding a twist to allow for a brand new level of skill-based scoring to take place.

My Games