Ballmen mod for Half-Life 2

6 comments by MovEaxEsp on Mar 30th, 2008 digg this super bookmark

Greetings. 

It's been about a week since our first release and things are going very well.  A number of maps have already been created  by our players that easily surpass the quality  of the maps in the release, and many more are on the way.  We've gotten a lot of feedback about bugs, possible improvements, and some very interesting feature requests that we're hoping to be able to address in the future releases.

The following is list of some of the things we plan to include in future releases:

• A new death effect.  Instead of ragdolling, or perhaps after ragdolling, the constituent parts of the player model will fly apart and bounce around for a bit.  This is something I've been thinking about for a while and I think it will make the players feel much more like Ballmen.
• A CTF type gamemode.  We haven't ironed out the specifics of this yet and we'll probably be discussing this on the forums when it comes time to implement it.
• Improved energy regeneration.  One of the biggest complaints so far has been that energy runs out too quickly and too often, and players are forced to run away from a fight in order to regenerate.  To remedy this, instead of always regenerating at a constant rate, energy will regenerate significantly faster when the player is low.  This should allow players to always be able to continue a fight if they so choose, while still requiring them to be mindful of their energy if they want to extensively use the more powerful weapons.
• Many new maps.  Since maps for Ballmen don't require (and probably shouldn't have) as much detail as maps for other games or mods, making maps takes considerably less time.  As such, a number of very original and fun maps have already been released by our players and more are on the way.  For those that  were frustrated by the numbr of sucides caused by "falling out" of the map, there will also be some maps which will be completely closed, and thus impossible to fall out of.
• Many tweaks and bugfixes.  We've gotten a number of suggestions on how to improve the UI of the mod(i.e. making it easier to read off the health/energy level) and a number of bugs that don't warrant their own bullets but are important nonetheless. 

You can check out some screenshots of one of the maps created by one of our players (fall safe by Flowerpod) in the  images section.  It is a lot of fun to play and, as the name suggests, its impossible to fall out of it, making it great for new players.

Visit the forums if you'd like to talk about these future changes or if you have some suggestions of your own to make. 

Of course, if you haven't tried Ballmen yet, you can watch the gameplay video and download the beta here.

See you in the game.