Ballance by Cyparade for Atari - Fight Against the Force of Gravity!

Cyparade for Atari

Cyparade is a German game development studio specialized in creating licensed games. Though Ballance is the studio's first game, Virtools solutions are nothing new to Cyparade.

The studio's founder Uli Weinberg formerly worked at Terratools, the first German game development studio that used Virtools technology as early as 1999 for titles such as Michael Schumacher Kart Racer (based on Formula 1 world champion “Schumi”).

Balance is published by Atari, Inc., formerly known as Infogrames. Atari is a leading global publisher and developer of interactive entertainment for both gaming enthusiasts and the mass-market audience. Atari publishes and distributes games for all platforms and are also a leading distributor of video game software in North America.


The Challenge

Cyparade's development team set out to create a strategic game for casual gamers based on the principles of gravity. The originality and specificity of Ballance lies in the possibility to change the ball's physical properties, in addition to the game's physically realistic simulation of all the components involved.

Ballance is a level-based puzzle game. Players move a ball through a hovering maze of paths and rails, facing mechanical obstacles such as seesaws, suspension bridges and pendulums along the way. Reach the end of each level without dropping the ball and you've met your goal. The game includes 12 increasingly challenging levels, each one involving ever more complex mechanisms and puzzles.

The game targets a very wide audience with extremely varied interests, so the need for an enticing scenario and captivating gameplay was crucial.



The Solution

Thanks to Virtools Dev, Cyparade created a game that's fun to play and also conveys basic understanding of simple mechanical processes. Players get a physical sense of the ball's inertia, and it is only by putting such notions of gravity to work that the game can be won.

Ballance gives players the option to change the texture of the ball and its associated physical parameters. But players first need to steer the ball into one of several special zones located throughout each level.

Thanks to low-level access offered by the Virtools SDK, the development team was easily able to integrate external physics technology, making it possible for players to feel how the ball handles differently according to its texture (paper, wood or stone).

Virtools technology greatly simplified the production process by offering a unified development hub for the entire team. A level designer, modeler/texturer, graphic designer, scripter and programmers were all able to focus on specialized tasks within the same development framework.

Using Virtools' unique building block approach, Cyparade's experienced Virtools users built a complex casual game that calls on players' logic and skill. Prototypes were made in just a matter of days, making the most of Virtools graphical programming to test game concepts and tune gameplay with optimized workflow and reduced production time and budget.



Key Benefits

• Reduced development cycle with costs and delays kept under control.
• Collaborative workflow, unified development hub.
  
  

See Screen Shots or visit Ballance website