Three years ago I quit my job at an advertising agency. I was unsure where to go from there, and in a drunken stupor downloaded Unity that night. I came up with a demo for a small phone game, inspired by Super Monkey Ball and the time I spent playing it as a child. I showed it to my brother (Badfish) and he was super into it, and began creating some models for it. Polyball has been through many iterations, and after 52 major updates today marks the culmination of what was started that night.
I had never worked with C#, let alone a game engine. I reached out to Yartch, a friend I met in college and was into game development. He helped us take the game to another level, and it was a running joke that one day we would be on Steam, something that seemed basically impossible. Unfortunately he had to leave the project in January, but I am thankful we had the chance to learn and build from his experience.
I reached out to another friend from college, Audioloom, who worked as a composer at a large game company in British Columbia. He was instrumental in bringing the audio of Polyball to life, and guide the musicians we hired to produce some beautiful things.
My brother has been also been a very important part of Polyball - he is responsible for all of the art in the game (other than the crappy stuff made by me). Somehow he has managed to balance university life and building a game.
And of course me and Badfish also have our parents to thank, from loaning us the thousand dollars to create a company, to putting up with our sometimes questionable choices (including sinking thousands of work hours into a ball rolling game) they have been very supportive of the whole process.
I’d also like to give a shout out to Ryan, who is the dev we brought on to help get online mode working after Yartch’s departure. The multiplayer code was simply way too complex for me to handle alone, and while it’s not going to be an esport anytime soon the multiplayer is in a very playable state and will be even more fleshed out in the future.
I would also like to extend a huge thanks to our community. From the speedrunners in Discord to the fan translators that have helped us translate the game to over 10 languages (with more on the way). This game would be nothing without you.
So where do we go from here? While it may be exiting Early Access, that doesn’t mean Polyball is finished. We have some exciting plans going forward - from polishing existing systems, to new modes, to new content, and even contests, that will hopefully keep the game being a relevant platformer for years to come.
Before I end this I’d just like to drop a few links:
Here’s our new trailer, if you could share this with your social networks that would be really cool and help the game a lot!
Here is the official Discord, this is where most of the discussion involving the game goes on and you can contact us directly in there if you have an issue.
And here is our Twitter, in case you want to keep up with what we are doing.
Thank you for being a part of this journey, keep on rollin’.