I first started making Crazy Ball in June 2012 as a project for my 2 semester senior design college course. I've been learning Unity3D on my own time for over 2 years prior to starting and this was the perfect opportunity to finally create a complete game title and cross off 2 courses at the same time.
Since then Crazy Ball has come a long way towards completion, but there's still some more to be done as illustrated by the following points:
- Final models for game elements
- More themes
- Particle effects
- A large hub level with different areas for different themes that are cutoff until a certain number of levels have been completed
- Better music and sound
- More exciting backgrounds
- More levels
Regarding that last point, my original plan was to release the game only after I've made a solid 50 levels. I figured that with that much content and a 1 dollar price tag, it'd really be a bang for the buck. The only issue is that it will take me quite awhile to create all 50 levels, considering that they'll have to get more and more challenging further on.
The truth is that i can technically release a fully functional base game right now. All the basic functionality and gameplay elements I had in mind have been coded and are working. I essentially have a complete level making toolset and all that's left is to make the levels and the rest of the bullet points mentioned above. I could in theory make something like 20 levels and then just provide free updates with level packs, but right now I'm leaning towards sticking to my plan of 50 levels.
Now since I essentially have a complete level making toolset, with a simple guide anyone can make Crazy Ball levels. The problem is that at the moment I simply don't know how to implement that properly. I make my levels in the Unity3D editor with exposed variables and source code and even if the someone did make some levels, I have no idea how they could be integrated with the released product, unless they send me the levels package and I manually put the levels into some "custom levels" section of the hub level and then release an update. But hey if anyone knows all about that stuff and can help that would be cool. Perhaps one day there can be an official site with downloadable level packages and simple installation instructions, who knows.....
Finally, I don't know when I'll be done, since unsurprisingly I got my own financial problems to deal with and working on this game doesn't exactly alleviate them at the moment, but I will be working on Crazy Ball little by little and I'll at least post an update whenever I make a new level or add/modify some major functionality. So for anyone who's interested, don't worry I won't let this become vaporware, this is my first serious game on which I have been working on for awhile now and I will make sure it reaches completion, eventually.
