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Dev Log
Notes from the workshop
Progress, experiments and the occasional disaster, straight from the team building BallOrcs and BallOrcs Battle.
BallOrcs Battle: the shared core moves in, and the Hollow learns where land is
A quieter fortnight for the war game, mostly about plumbing and fit and finish.
Orchard rings, a furnace run and five more places to roll
This was a week of new ground. Level 2 stopped being a short hop: a long gauntlet of patrolling enemies, fire-spitters and geysers now turns it into a ten-minute level.
BallOrcs Battle: the orcs stop walking into walls
Orcs now find their way around walls of fire and barricades instead of getting stuck, plus a skirmish menu and health bars for hurt units.
The jump that went further than the glide, and a level wide enough to prove it
Two weeks of fixing what the first full playthrough turned up.
A human played it at last, and the feet were inside the ball
Somebody who is not a computer finally sat down and played BallOrcs, and the report was blunt.
BallOrcs Battle: you can buy an army now, and the unfairness had a compass direction
Until this week you could move your orcs and that was very nearly all.
BallOrcs Battle: the Hollow learns to walk, and fails its own fairness test
All five playable tribes now have a unit and a spell that only they get. The Cinderkin field a walking bomb and lay a line of fire nobody may cross.
The phone that rendered fine and photographed black
Last week a single bug produced 129 separate crash reports. The bug was fixed then; the reporting got fixed this week.
A permanent name, a PAUSE button, and 129 crashes that were one bug
BallOrcs got its permanent phone name, touchscreen prompts that name the real buttons, and a PAUSE button. Plus 129 crashes that were one bug.
BallOrcs Battle: the orcs learn to eat and fight, and a robot plays 1024 matches to check it
Until this week Battle's orcs could walk. That was it. They had no way to feed themselves, no way to fight, and no reason to be anywhere in particular.
The canyon gets a finale, the game gets a voice, and the crash was in the cache
BallOrcs has sound. Rolling, jumping, landing, picking up an orb — and a piece of music for each level, fading into the next one as you move between them.
A canyon, a caravan, and a build that was broken on three platforms
Two new places to be.
BallOrcs Battle: the phone build stops being a button somebody has to remember
No new battlefield this week — this was a week under the floorboards.
Which bit of an eyeball is the eye, and a fix that took three goes
Your orc lets you pick colours for almost everything — but not its eyes.
BallOrcs Battle: we broke our own test on purpose, to see if it would notice
Last week we hand-checked that the Windows and Linux versions play out an identical battle.
The build that died of silence, and the orc who would not sit still
No new orc hats this week — this was a week of fixing the machine that assembles the game.
BallOrcs Battle: the same battle on two operating systems, down to the last bit
A Windows build and a Linux build were given the same orders and finished with exactly the same battle, which fair online play depends on.
Make your orc at the door, and change your mind at the barber's
Last week the orc you built finally turned up in the level. This week there is a way to build one.
BallOrcs Battle: 5,000 orcs at 60fps — and six tests that were only pretending
Two questions got real answers this week. First: can this thing actually run an army?
Your orc turns up to the level — dressed, tinted, and told what it hasn't earned
Until this week the wardrobe and the game were strangers.
BallOrcs Battle: an army you can see, orders you can give, robots to give them
Last time, BallOrcs Battle was an engine with no picture — a war simulated purely in numbers. This week it got a face.
Design corner: every level is a question, your orc is the answer
A BallOrc is whatever you bolt onto it.
Two levels, three abilities, and a wardrobe of faces
A week ago BallOrcs was a few test steps in an empty room.
BallOrcs Battle boots up: a deterministic war engine on a hex world
Our second game, BallOrcs Battle, just got its beating heart.
Playtesters asked, the ball answered: arrow keys, orbit camera, a heavier jump
We played the Windows build like real players and wrote down every 'why can't I…' — then fixed the lot. Arrow keys now work alongside WASD.
Blender joins the toolchain (built from source, naturally)
BallOrcs needs real 3D models — orcs, hats, founts, whole levels — and the placeholder art keeps reminding us of that.
The robot playtesters clock in for real
Last week we built AI bots that playtest the game. This week we put them on the payroll.
The crash that wasn't ours, and the window that stayed black
Three nasty bugs in one day, all invisible on our Linux test rig. On Windows the game crashed instantly at launch. Fixed that — and got a window that stayed pure black.
Crash reports without the cloud: GlitchTip
When the game crashes on a player's machine, we want it to tell us what happened — automatically, with enough detail to fix it.
First roll: the walking skeleton
The game is now a game: a ball you can steer around a test arena, with rolling, jumping, a chase camera and a goal flag.
Four platforms, one green light
The game now builds itself for Windows, Linux, web browsers, and Android — automatically, every week, from one button.
The game on paper: BallOrcs, the Hollow King, and a ten-week plan
BallOrcs got its story.
Lore corner: nobody knows what the Hollow King is
The BallOrcs Realm is loud, bouncy, and gloriously ridiculous — every orc a one-of-a-kind sphere of clashing parts and proud little noises. Then the Hollow King came.
A trailer from pure code (and why it's all placeholder)
BallOrcs has a 67-second announcement trailer, box art and an app icon, all drawn by code. They're placeholders until real in-game footage replaces them.
A thousand robot playtesters (who never get bored)
We hired playtesters who work for free, never sleep, and file perfect bug reports: little AI bots that live inside the game.
First light: a bit-identical Linux build
By the end of day one, the factory produced its first game package — and then produced it again, from scratch, byte-for-byte identical.
Hello, Realm: why BallOrcs builds everything from source
BallOrcs is a colourful 3D platformer about round little creatures. Day one went on building the factory that will make the game.
Our own forge: GitLab, a registry, and runners in a 10 GB box
We built our own private build factory: a code-hosting site, an image warehouse and robot workers, all running on one modest Windows PC.
Pin everything: taming a moving engine
Game engines and their helper libraries update constantly, and 'latest version' today is a different program than 'latest version' next month.
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