Balls

My attempt at making popular mobile game Ballz. I have got the game to a state that I am happy with. It has a game loop with some cool visuals and audio.

Things that I am proud of in this project are:

1. Creating the ‘aiming’ effect, the large red triangular thing, without any outside help. By that I mean I was able to do the math and the effect all by myself!
2. Setting up the grid for the boxes and triangles, I went through a lot of iterations for this. It began with a list of all the objects and iterating through them to update their position. Then it moved to a much more intelligent grid system where each object is aware of its own position and where it will be moving in the next round.
3. The cool bloom effects and the materials used by all the objects in the game I made. Which you can probably tell by how janky it looks haha. But it was a good first attempt using Gimp as I have never called myself an artist:
   
   I kind of like the effect of the triangle not being perfect.
4. Used some simple inheritance for the spawnable objects. This made it easy to add the triangle which increased the total amount of balls.

Some things I still want to improve upon:

1. How the balls move once the hit the base.
2. Displaying the ‘balls to shoot’ and ‘returned balls’. It is very spammy and massively inaccurate.
3. Add some background images to give the idea of progressing levels.
4. Do more with the audio as the levels get higher.
5. There is one issue I need to resolve: Public Reviews #1

You can play the game right now!

Ballz

GitHub Actions

The cool thing that I was able to set up with this project was a GitHub action (following game.ci) to build the Unity project for me, then using another action to upload the build to to my Itch page (following Creating a free build pipeline for Unity games using GitHub Actions)!

The major advantage of this would be the ability to distribute test builds QA, testers or your audience without having to do much yourself. Although there is a lot in the set up. Once everything it done, it should continue to work without much up keep!

Hopefully, I will be able to use this knowledge for a larger scale project in the future.

Commits	Message
1	Initial commit
2	Uploading project and fixing ignore
3	Spawning the grid I can spawn a grid with boxes and numbers No other functionality yet
4	Might continue to work on this?
5	Added ball spawning, input interaction and an indicator for the direction and force of the shot. Things are not colliding which is the next thing to fix
6	Implemented a round counter and rounds. Current issue is the boxes are not moving down correctly.
7	Something was not being clean up properly. So, I destroy every object in both lists then clean them. For reasons?
8	Base game working. Lots of bugs. Could add a lot of polish. Fixed spawning heavily on the left had side. Need to implement: Main menu Pause menu End screen Audio Modifiers More balls Colors
9	Included in the last commit just forgot to stage
10	Balls are no longer colliding with each other.
11	Unity Save
12	Massive refactor. Created BaseSpawnable: - This is the base for any object that is spawned at the start of a game round. Currently includes boxes and stars. - This means that I can add more objects to spawn in new rounds which is cool. Box refactor: - Will now change colour depending on value. Currently only green when less then 5 and red when more than.
13	The first ball to hit the base will set the ballSpawn position. Adding a new angle when starting the round.
14	Cleaning up an error with resetting the ball spawn position. Now working on setting a minimum speed for the balls.
15	Added min speed which can be set in the game manager.
16	Made good progress. Currently working on scaling the gravity depending on the round duration.
17	Closing Unity
18	Scaling gravity value with round length. It is currently just a magic number so that could be better implemented at some point. To do: Main menu End screen Sound
19	Moving the Unity project to the right place.
20	Issues with balls amount display and how it is set
21	Unity close
22	Checking I haven’t broken the repo
23	Create activation.yml
24	Testing workflow
25	Update TestLicense.yml
26	Update TestLicense.yml
27	Create main.yml
28	Delete .github/workflows/TestLicense.yml
29	Update main.yml
30	Testing work action
31	Removing project path
32	Update activation.yml
33	Update activation.yml
34	Delete .github/workflows/main.yml
35	Update and rename activation.yml to main.yml
36	Moving into a folder
37	Correcting git ignore
38	Update main.yml
39	Merge branch ‘master’ of https://ConnorY97@github.com/ConnorY97/Ballz.git
40	Work .yml
41	Adding activate
42	Update main.yml
43	Update main.yml
44	Update main.yml
45	Update main.yml
46	Update main.yml
47	Update main.yml
48	Update main.yml
49	Update main.yml
50	Update main.yml
51	Update main.yml
52	Update GameManager.cs and UnityConnectSettings.asset
53	Update main.yml
54	Testing build to Itch
55	Changing the channel name
56	Following git example rather than blog. Attempt at fixing caching issue as well, now building to both WebGL and Win64
57	Email has been verified and testing new caching values
58	I think I still need to upload the project to github cause it currently cant find it. But I think I am getting close
59	Captilization?
60	Adding download action
61	I messed with the upload artifact path which caused it to fail. Which in turn caused the downlaod the fail Fixed that change
62	Updating path the artifact
63	Didn’t save :(
64	Changing build to WebGL
65	Updating path and bringing back the download checker to see where the files are exactly
66	Fixing a syntax error
67	Trying to find the right download path
68	Putting the upload runner and download runner in the same job. This would make sense why nothing was being found since the files weren’t there anymore
69	Trying to find the right window size
70	Close Unity
71	Updating action to only build on specific branch: ‘Build
72	Update main.yml
73	To do:
74	Adding FMOD integration and project.
75	Closing Unity
76	Changing the BGM. Creating the build branch
77	Finally got post processing to work. I will work on adding bloom now.
78	Managed to make an emission map for the box. Next ball and triangle.
79	Created triangle emission map
80	Thinking of adding a grid rather than just having a list of current spawnitems. This will allow for nicer movement of the objects at round end. Hopefully.
81	Started looking into a new spawning function which will use the grid.
82	Implemented the grid with spawnable objects being spawned and using it. Need to implement lerping function and sizing correctly. Going good
83	Lots of stuff!
84	Closing Unity
85	Stopped DoNotDestroy objects doubling up
86	Update DoNotDestroy.cs
87	Going to move the project over to a mobile 2d project to aid in getting the sizing correct on Itch.
88	Closing Unity
89	That was a mistake, so I have gotten rid of it
90	Figured out the correct resolution but manually building. Now going to pass it to the action to test.
91	Re-implementing the scaling gravity
92	Finally happy with the sizing on Phone, will have to fix it for pc. But it is a phone game so oh well
93	Adding Volume slider Josh made a good observation that there is no way to control the volume, so I added an options screen with a volume slider. Thanks Josh
94	Updating actions as suggested