Catch the ball on its colour and the music builds, one note at a time. One miss ends the run.
Also on Windows, Mac and Linux, and on itch.io. Nothing to install to try it.
Made by one person. Every note synthesised at runtime, 15 languages, six build targets from one CI run. How it's built →
Four seconds of a Classic run, recorded in 0.10.4, without its sound. The game itself runs in the browser, sound on. Open it full screen.
The sound
PolyBall ships with no music files at all. Every sound you hear came from how you played.
Land the ball on its colour and you hear it. That was you.
First the bass. Then the harmony. Hit Fever and the whole thing takes off.
Silence. Then you tap play again, because that song was getting good.
Chord AmStreak 0
Trailer
A quick look
Modes
The pure loop. Endless, and it only gets faster.
Classic, plus a new twist every ten catches. Each stage ends on a boss ball.
Perform the song. Balls land on the beat.
Beat the clock. Clean catches buy back seconds.
No clock, no score, and no way to lose.
Leaderboard
The best Classic runs on five sides, live from the game. Beat one and your name goes up here.
Get it
Android is the best way to play, and the browser build needs nothing at all. Desktop builds are version 0.10.8.
iPhone and iPad are coming later. The browser version works there today.
How it's built
The engineering, for anyone who wants to look. Nothing below is rounded in my favour.
No audio files ship with PolyBall. There is a synthesiser instead: sixteen additive voices with physically modelled partials, colour mapped to chord degree across an eight-bar progression, and bass, arpeggio and lead performed note by note on a swung grid. That is why the soundtrack can only be the run you just played.
So nobody does. Continuous integration builds macOS, the iOS simulator, an iOS device, Linux, Web and Windows from one run, and gameplay bots play twenty-four runs a pass with deliberate mistakes injected, so the economy numbers that come out the other end look like a real player's rather than a perfect one's.
Opt-in telemetry records each move as a line of JSON under an anonymous rotating install id, partial runs included. That data re-derived the curve as a reaction budget instead of a guess, which removed the deaths that were caused by an impossible deadline rather than a mistake, all the way from three sides up to sixty-three.
Fifteen locales, including Modern Standard and Egyptian Arabic, with right-to-left layout and bidirectional share text both covered by automated tests rather than a spot check before release.
And nobody had noticed. Creating an audio bus at runtime disconnects the master bus from the speakers on the web export, which is an engine bug, not a game one. The fix was to stop creating buses after boot. On top of that, iOS mutes web audio when the physical ringer switch is off, so the shell now nudges the context back awake. Both were found by a check that measures the real signal reaching the output, because counting buffers had said everything was fine.
Fair play
