Bounce Ball

Showcases
1

Hey everyone!

Sharing my latest game.

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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.

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12 Likes
2

We have the best community in the world. :heart:

I love it! Sounds like you built a really useful tool for yourself!

5 Likes
3

thanks for building it and thanks for your engine

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it is really helpful when numbers are starting to grow, like after 6-8 hours of playing.

5 Likes
4

This is a very engaging game. I spent quite some time playing it and even came back later to finish it off :slight_smile:
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?

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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.

4 Likes