The game is already fully playable in your browser on Poki, weighs in at under 3.5-4 MB, and even runs smoothly on potato. We’re about 80 % of the way to the feature-complete version, but there’s already plenty to enjoy—and I’d love to hear what you think.
Heart-felt thanks
Special thanks to @aglitchman—his help was priceless. Bounce Ball was built around his high-quality trail system. When it began throwing errors, he not only repaired the code for the project but also answered an endless stream of my naïve questions, patiently explained how everything works, and delivered powerful feedback. At times it felt like he was doing more of the heavy lifting than I was. I’m immensely grateful.
Many thanks as well to the Defold community, especially @AGulev and @BunBunBun. As an artist, Defold still isn’t the most intuitive toolset for me, but the speed at which the community steps in to help (and the core team rolls out fixes) more than makes up for it. They are the reason this entire build fits in 4 MB yet still feels slick.
Finally, credit to the Poki team—none of them will probably read this, but their developer portal, fit-tests, and video tooling allowed us to polish the game’s presentation in ways that simply wouldn’t have been feasible otherwise. Huge respect!
Behind-the-scenes lessons & tools
First-ever shaders. This project finally pushed me to write custom shaders. Shaders itself wasn’t the hard part—the real challenge was persuading Defold’s material pipeline to accept and wire them up correctly. Harder than expected, but very satisfying once they lit up on screen.
The indefatigable testing bot. I also built an autopilot bot that grinds through Bounce Ball for hours while I’m sleeping, eating, or showering. It records video, logs stats, and tries every combination of options. Its random, rule-oblivious clicks have exposed more bugs than I ever could— and, thankfully, it works for free. Simulating a “typical” player this way has been invaluable, and I’ve grown rather fond of the little QA gremlin.
What’s next?
Add the missing 10 power-ups/objects
More visual juice (screen shake and better particle bursts)
Localise
How you can help
Play the current build (still in soft launch) on Poki and tell me what feels fun—or frustrating.
Spot a bug? Post it here and I’ll squash it.
If you enjoy the game, a simple Like and small review on Poki is the best thank-you you can give right now.
This is a very engaging game. I spent quite some time playing it and even came back later to finish it off
I’m not sure if it was intentional, but I really appreciate that the game doesn’t overwhelm the player with closing blocks. instead, it feels quite meditative.
May I ask how the ball movement is handled? Is it done using built-in physics?
Thanks for the feedback—that’s pretty much exactly what we were aiming for.
Yes, we’re using the engine’s built-in physics and no extra libraries. In my experience it’s best not to mess around with physics and just rely on what’s already in the engine; otherwise you can spend ages chasing bottlenecks and bugs and wondering why the game behaves differently from the last update.
Thank you so much for the initial support, the game got a nice boost thanks to your votes and is feeling good right now, it’s above average poki game in terms of performance.
Came up with the idea to freshen up the boss collection a bit, so introduced combining different bosses into some kind of brainrot monster. The mechanics seem to look organic, hopefully it will appeal to everyone.
P.S. With this update I’ve certainly gotten further away from God, but I hope that the average play time will be higher
CONGRATS! I’ve been trying to publish a game on Poki for a year now and I never passed the 3 min filters.
Your game is really nice, great sfx and addictive. Awesome work!
As promised, checking in after the Obon holiday event. 18,000 players finished it — roughly 10× more than we expected, especially given it takes about 5–8 hours to complete.
Right now it’s running on purely organic traffic (no UA spend yet), so we’d really appreciate your ratings and reviews.
To be a bit closer to mobile F2P norms, we’ve added a shop and special boosters. The build is lightweight and runs smoothly even on very old devices.
What’s next
An update with 50 new mini-bosses (in progress)
A Halloween update
Plus 3 additional enemies
After that, we’ll consider the game about 95% complete.
Results on the web have been very strong — now the goal is to bring that success over to mobile.
Thanks for playing and for any feedback you can share!
