Great work and its pretty tricky too! Great price tag too haha! Will be getting it, please flag me when it's out!
Looking at the OpenFeint leaderboards the top score right now is 37! I think the highest score I have ever got on Insane is in the 20s
My top score on Insane is 25, which I'm pretty happy with. Admittedly I got two Ball Busters in a row to achieve that! I usually bore of most iPhone games pretty quickly due to the quick moving market, but Starball is a game I know I'll keep playing. Hopefully you'll continue to support the game with updates like Doodle Jump. One thing I think could be useful is touch anywhere to pause. I consistently found myself wanting to quickly pause the game but miss the pause button, and since the game is completely accelerometer controlled at the moment, there is no negative to making it touch anywhere.
We have extensive plans for updates including achievements, additional power-ups and theming for the holidays. I like the idea for touch anywhere to pause... as for the pause button this is a known bug that it is easy to miss and we have plans to make the touch area bigger. We will have to consider the touch anywhere to pause functionality instead!
Hey guys. We took a long weekend for the Thanksgiving break here in the US, but we are back now... Here is a little background... In order to get some external impressions of our new game Starball, we offered a preview copy of the game to a small, random selection of active contributors in the forum community. We know there are many active members of the TA community and we hope to include other members for future games as well. Thanks for taking the time to try out the game, and thanks a TON for posting your impressions and feedback! Internally, we have found the game really addicting to play and it has been great to get some outside impressions and feedback to benchmark against. We are very excited to hear that you guys also found the game to be a lot of fun. We hope it does well in the App Store. Specific individual replies to follow...
so when is this coming out? anxiously awaiting a nice pick up and play game. this is something i can see me and my family passing around trying to beat eachothers scores.
Wow! We could not have described better ourselves. So great to hear that you like the game. Thanks for the glowing "review"! Point taken on the music and we will be adding music to the first update of the game! For what it's worth, our initial thought on creating music for the game was that we didn't want it to detract from the pure, simple fun of the gameplay. But, after playing it A LOT, we too think it could use a couple little ditties.
Skyye, thanks for taking the time and posting your impressions. It's great to hear that you enjoy the game. We are also sticklers on game controls and think the iDevices offer such cool and unique control options if done right. There are 6 power-ups (added a summary of each to main post) in this original version, with additional power-ups that we will be adding in future updates. Ball Buster is certainly the mother of all the power-ups! It is the rarest, but when it goes off with 15+ hazards on the board, it's a new lease on life and a spectacle to be sure! Music coming next update. Yes, 99 cents is the price. Regarding the "iconic element"... It was good to read your feedback on this, we will be taking it to heart. Early on, we did discuss a fair amount the fact that the simplistic nature of the graphics are not screaming "pick me! pick me!", as you so perfectly put it. On one side we wanted the graphics to appeal to the widest audience possible and represent the simplistic nature of the addicting game play. On the other side, this makes it brutally hard to "market" or "show off visually" when all you have are screen shots for the most part to get people's initial attention (case in point, your first reaction to the game from just the screen shots we posted). The game is crazy addicting, but so simple to play, screen shots can't really convey that element. We do intend to offer various "themes" that we will be introducing in the first update. Same addicting game play, but a more detailed graphical appearance. Once we get these in place, we will have more "substantial, show-off" screenshots to use in marketing and promo. More about the coming update in an separate post.
Thanks Palfince for posting your impressions of the game and for the great feedback! We are excited that every "outside" person who has played the game so far has loved it. Re: achievements... We have quite a few of them already lined up and plan to add them to a future update (if not the first update, the 2nd!). We already support OpenFeint for the score tracking, so adding in the achievements will be straight forward. Great idea on the "purist" mode w/o the power-ups. This would eventually "cap out" to a max score over time (simply due to having no way to rid the play field of the hazards), but it would be a great challenge to try and better your score like this. We will certainly be considering adding this to an update!
@Enigmous Yes, we support OF for score tracking and we will be adding in Achievements in the next update or 2. @Grumps We will be sure to post here as soon as we get approval. Thanks for your vote of support! @dumbname Its currently "In Review" status with Apple.. so hopefully will not be to much longer. Based on what you said in your post, we think you will really enjoy playing it! @antony.thai Thanks for your support!
That's a pretty good score for Insane mode. You have to rely on the power-ups quite a bit more in that mode because it gets hectic so quickly. Re: Touch anywhere to pause... Like Shawn wrote in his post, that is a great idea! There is really no reason not to have it this way. We are planning on changing the pause feature to this type of implementation for the first Update. Re: Updates... Yes! and Yes! We are planning on updating this game continually. We have several different elements that we want to explore: Achievements, new power-up ideas, different graphic themes, music, as well as various tweaks to game elements and features. We hope it does well in the store because that obviously helps fuel the perpetual updates.
Wow... in review. Im sure we will see the game any day now (assuming the reviewer can actually put down the game lol)
I too got a preview build of starball. It is a very good game. There are other games that have the same concept as starball but starball's polished graphics and gameplay make it head and shoulders above its competition. Obviously everyone knows the controls and how the game works by all the other replys on this thread, so I'm gonna skip that. I felt that the game was very addicting, as promised, and very simple. But the powerups really added to the gameplay and influenced your moves in starball. Although most of the powerups are good, some do have bad parts to them. The shrinking powerup makes you smaller, which helps you dodge balls, but also makes you use more precision to hit the stars. This actually adds to the gameplay. I noticed that the balls only move in a grid like pathway. Either going horizontal or vertical. That means you can predict where the balls will go and act accordingly. Thiese movement patterns occasionally make "safe spots" in which you can gather your wits in for sometime, but once you collect some more stars, the spawning balls will have a path that cuts through these spots. So you got strategy in there too! I hope that in future updates a hexagonal (or anyother shape with more than 4 sides) map will be added. This would make it even harder because you then have to watch more than two directions and there is truly never a definite "safe spot" in which you can take recluse in. Overall the game is fantasticly made, and VERY addicting. One of those games that you cant resist taking one more try at. When this comes out I highly recommend it to everyone.
As an opinionated goof that hasn't even seen the game yet, I agree, at least in theory, that it might be nice to have balls in later stages coming in at different angles. Another potential idea, have a few rare "drunken balls" that can take nearly any path but, so as to not make it completely impossible to deal with, perhaps they can have their next few seconds worth of their upcoming path indicated (as if they're moving down a constantly moving section of road that follows them along).
Now having had a chance to see it first hand with it's SMOOTH AS BUTTER tilt controls and animation I ask the following.... I'm taking it as a very intentional design choice to not give the player points for ball busting? I mean Ball Bomb, Ball Buster, and Invinciball are all about allowing you the player to bust some redsters but as the game works currently I get no credit for doing so. Please though, understand, other than this whine/question, this game is AWESOME and very addictive! One of those incredibly simple concepts that makes for an amazingly addictive game that anybody can get the basics of in seconds but, without some steady hands and nerves of steel, only last a few seconds as well (which is great for quick intense bouts).
