Poke My Balls Project
By Frank “Weekie” Podraza
This project was released and has an official landing page.
Poke My Balls is an iOS and Android arcade game. Colored balls fall down, and you must poke all of one color, and none of the others. Compete with your friends for a high score. Poke blue balls, red balls, and black balls too. Poke My Balls was released on August 22nd, 2016. After being in development for a couple of months.
Screenshot Gallery
Development Process
I started development on Poke My Balls in the summer of 2016. I wanted to make the next Flappy Bird, and this game was an idea I had floating around in my head for about a year. I toyed with prototypes in Unity and one in BuildBox. I settled on Unity because BuildBox did not allow any upward mobility when it came to game scope or programming ability. Unity did. I started working and built most of the game in a couple of days. I wrote the entire project in JavaScript, as that was all I knew. I had only been programming for a year at this point. The game was released on iOS on August 22nd, 2016, and a few weeks later on Android. I released a few updates in the following months, adding a colorblind mode, more settings, and fixing bugs.
A year later, I had become a more experienced programmer. For the first time, I did what I tend to do nowadays, which is to come back to a project after learning more, and applying what I’ve learned. I wanted to overhaul the game. I have learned C# over the past year. I used C# and added 2 more game modes: Power Poking and Living by Poking. Power poking had falling powerups that added depth to the game. Living by Poking allowed to play to use 3 lives to get as far as possible. I avoided editing as much of the JavaScript as possible, the JavaScript was messy, overwritten, and generally bad code. I also added In-App Purchasing to hopefully obtain some revenue.
Over the next year, I toyed with more game mode ideas and wanted to release another update. To do this, I needed a new version of Unity to support iOS and Android improvements. Unfortunately, I had hit the limit with JavaScript. Unity deprecated it in the version I needed to use. This meant I would have to overhaul to entire basic codebase and rewrite all of it in C#. It was starting from scratch. This was a roadblock for me. I didn’t want to commit time to a project with no active players, even if an update could bring in some new users.
That roadblock got metaphorically smaller a year later. I was now in University. In my first proper programming course, I learned more than I had in the past 3 years. The biggest concept I learned was polymorphism, and the ability to make a parent class, with subclasses having modified behaviors. These concepts spawned an idea in my brain. To make the game more expandable, at least when it comes to game modes. I could make a console cartridge system. There was a set of systems that acted as the console, and the game modes acted as cartridges, holding the behaviors for certain events. I then rewrite the whole codebase with this philosophy. That is the update that is currently available. I have no plans to update the game further.
What I learned:
- A stopping point is necessary, if you don’t tell yourself when to stop, you’ll keep going forever.
- Advertising is important, it’s really hard to get users as a solo developer with no resources.
- Build/program as general as possible, to allow easy expansion in the future.
- Keep code neat. It is less daunting to come back to.