Q-ball
Q-ball was the second side project Brian and I completed. The key objective of this project was to convert a simple 2D game into a Papervision3D app.
The process went similar to Skyro, in that I started with the mechanics and interaction, then the graphics were built on top. The interaction I wanted to focus on was the rolling 3D ball following the mouse, but in fact the majority of the game mechanics are processed in 2D and then rendered with 3D models.
Q-ball started with some other characters inside the ball, as the development was based around a competition to integrate user generated characters. At that stage it was called Feezball, but did quite poorly in the contest and the reviews weren’t great so we re-branded it to Q-ball. Development took about one to two months, however 60% of that time was spent debugging and optimising the 3D rendering.
We managed to get out a fairly solid PPV3D game, but the major downfall it the awkwardness of the controls. The ball-following-mouse action is great until you actually need to aim, and no matter what I tried it didn’t get much better. After you play for a bit things get easier to control, but people probably dropped it because of the early difficulties. Even though it didn’t go so well with the masses, I’m pretty happily with the technical achievement and B’s graphics weren’t too shabby either.
