Ballmonsters? WTF?

For those of you who aren't aware, Precinct Omega as the company it is today basically began with the purchase of the intellectual property rights to a range of miniatures called "ballmonsters", which are, well, ball-shaped monsters.

Occasionally I get asked when I'm going to release the game I intended to write for them, and my answer has always been "well, not for a while, because I just can't seem to write a game that captures the spirit of cheerfully disgusting violent humour that I've been trying to achieve with the game.  I've made two attempts and both have left me disappointed with the ultimate result.

Then, out of nowhere, inspiration hit me in the face this morning.

I was pondering manufacturing, which led me to wonder about casting them in metal rather than resin, which made me think that they'd be far too heavy on their flying stands, which made me think about basing them on flat bases, which made me think that this would mean they weren't floating any more which made me think...

Holy sh*t!  What if they weren't floating!!

And from that simple chain of thought an entirely new concept for the game just blobbed its way out of my brain as I stood, staring at myself in the mirror, toothbrush poised halfway to my mouth.

Of such things are new games made.  Almost all of my games can, in essence, be traced back to a single lightbulb moment and I've learned to have a feel for when the moment of inspiration is just... right.  And this idea feels right.

There's a lot still to be worked out, but I instantly had the idea of ballmonster tribes, living in the deep, dark woods, that compete for territory and dominance through rituals of combat in which they bounce, roll and bite their way to victory.  I realized that my old fixation upon making the game echo real world billiards was holding back a better exploration of the phase space of the possible games and immediately got a heap of ideas for push-your-luck mechanics in which balls make longer or higher bounces in pursuit of greater damage, but at greater risk to themselves.  Taking away the "cue ball" idea meant taking away the requirement for judging angles and cannons that made the game too "mathy" and not silly enough.  And adding a "dummy ball" belonging to neither side gives the game a feeling more akin to Rugby League or Association Football, with a clear object (scoring) that can still sit well alongside a secondary objective (bumping, squashing and eating the other side's "players").

Anyway, I've still got a lot to work out, but it feels like Ballmonsters is back on the agenda for the first time in a while.  It's still behind Horizon Wars: Midnight Dark on the release schedule, but it feels like a thing that could, actually, now happen.