Aimee Seaver of Cryptic Sea sat down with me on the GDC floor to discuss the furry frenzy that is Invasion of the Balls. The story is that small alien balls are invading the earth in attempt to find something that was lost. The balls, each about the size of a mouse, are willing to die for their queen in this quest.

Invasion of the Balls is essentially a 2-D platformer that will allow up to 100 players online and 4 players locally to join the invasion. The balls can select one of a load of abilities during each level to maximize their rampage of Earth while exploring for what was lost. Money results from the rampage of destroying stuff, and players can purchase upgrades for each of their abilities up to three levels. There will be no in-game purchasing,but  there may be random drops of abilities in the game.

The balls have to work together to destroy some of the bigger objects. Aimee explained an example. With a grandfather clock in one level, one ball can’t do it by itself. An anti-gravity enabled ball makes the clock float a little, then an explosion empowered ball makes it slowly tip over, and finally the anti-gravity ball makes it crash down.

Above the four player split screen, there is a mini-map so that players know where they are. Aimee said that a future build will have larger boxes that match the color of the players’ balls to make their relative location more pronounced for quicker glancing at the mini-map. Each stage also has a timer. Taken from the developer’s blog, there are currently five stage types:

• Destroy: Break as many things as possible, everyone smashes, everyone wins.
• Race: First one to the end gets all the cash.
• Elimination: Two teams, last team remaining wins the round, first team to 3 wins gets the money.
• Harvest: Collect food for the Queen!
• Rescue: Save fellow spawnlings from devious human clutches.

The game is playable on keyboard or game pad. Aimee said the game pad was way more fun. When the character first spawns, players make a choice of which power up is best suited for the type of stage. Aimee described most of the abilities and their usefulness. The balls can have an enhanced jump, run to go faster, heavy to make them grow and squish enemies or knock over large objects (and also help propel other balls if they jump into each other), big to throw stuff around with ease, and explosion to suicide and blow up almost anything.

While Invasion of the Balls doesn’t have an exact release date, Aimee mentioned that Cryptic Sea will release another game soon that is an action puzzle game, called Triaxia. She stated that a demo of the Balls will be included. The Invasion of the Balls will be available for PC, Mac, and Linux.

Early beta demo of Invasion of the Balls
[GDC 2011 media by Steven Bardales]