Ball Blazing Fantasy is a retro-style arcade game where the player controls a ball. It features two games in one, Ball Blaze and The Quest.
The Quest is a complete arcade adventure of mineral gathering, with various life forms and hazards as obstacles. Ball Blaze is a soccer-like sport where the players are balls too, with practice and tournament mode available.
Download the game here: bbf10.zip (486 KB)
Game features:
- two separate game modes
- 4 Ball Blaze arenas
- Quest featuring 16 levels spread in 4 worlds with scrolling
- password feature to start and the beginning of each world
- illustrated story and endings both for Ball Blaze and The Quest
- vibrant menus including a high scores table
- MIDI background music (non-original tracks)
Revews:
Author's note (Dec. 2006):
Ball Blazing Fantasy was my best received QBasic game, and even outside the community it got very flattering reviews. It is a rather interesting game, highly polished, but suffers a lot because of my below average coding skills (at that point). Its poor ball to ball and ball to wall collision is the biggest flaw of the game, but strangely enough the game was never trashed because of it, though I would understand that. The second flaw is the movement of the ball, which is too sensitive. The acceleration should have been higher, as well as the ground friction. I'll be honest, I was completely oblivious to this flaw/defect until playing the game few months ago, after completely losing the sense of controlling the ball (acquired during development). There is also bunch of other flaws of a smaller scale, like the clumsy 'falling into pits' animation and similar. The graphics are average, and there are many places that could have been done much better. I’m happy that quite few people enjoyed the game despite these flaws. The Quest mode is one of the most complete (and longest) gameplay experiences I ever designed, and it’s comforting to know that some people went through all of it, kept trying and trying until completing it.
I wouldn't mind porting Ball Blazing Fantasy to FreeBASIC. I'm pretty sure I would be able to fix the collision and the other programming flaws. The graphics are another thing, and I wouldn’t like to start until confident enough in my abilities to substantially improve the graphics (this mostly comes to better drawn/animated life forms).
