Ball x Pit x Interview

GTA VI was delayed today, but that's not as important as a Ball x Pit interview, right?

Ball x Pit. Screenshot: Kenny Sun & Friends, Devolver Digital

I was recently obsessed with a game called Ball x Pit.

It is, as I’ve noted, partially a game about bouncing balls—Breakout-style—against waves of enemies.

And it is partially a game about bouncing townspeople—pinball-style—over fields of wheat and into buildings, in order to improve one’s ball-firing powers.

I was obsessed with a game that I thought was frequently laughing at me for being so obsessed with it.

At one point, for example, I unlocked a character called the Cogitator who started making some of my decisions in the game for me.

Was the game’s lead developer, Brooklyn-based Kenny Sun, trying to be funny?

“I don’t know if I wanted to make the player laugh,” he recently told me over a video call. “but I definitely felt like I was kind of playing jokes on the player.”

“Like having a character that picks upgrades for you, I feel like it’s not a thing you really see in games.”

That’s just one of the jokes in Ball x Pit, and not even the game’s best. (I’m not going to spoil it. Let’s just say it’s a radical idea.)

As players progress through Ball x Pit, they unlock new levels where they can fight new waves of enemies. Players also unlock new buildings to add to the town-building part of the game, and they will activate new characters who have weirder and weirder approaches to firing off a fusillade of balls (Sun’s favorite is The Flagellant, whose balls must bounce off of his own body for him to use them again).

Unlocking all of that feels like progress. Those numbers keep going up.

But I have wondered: Does it even matter how I play this game? There’s very little aiming to do and things just kind of happen.

When I’m playing, am I really just firing off the balls and hoping for the best? After all, even when I fail, I’m gathering enough resources to come back stronger the next time I go into ball-shooting battle.

I asked Sun this question: Is there such a thing as playing Ball x Pit well vs playing it poorly?

“I think there is a bit of a skill curve, but I do think it plateaus pretty quickly,” he said. “Once you get it, there’s not much you can do to improve your play. So, it is very much a game about pretending that you’re getting better by getting better stats, actually.”

An incredible quote, right there.

Here’s another good bit from Sun. We were discussing how some of the buildings that players unlock in Ball x Pit start automating the game, transforming Ball x Pit from something that feels like Breakout or Arkanoid to more of a plays-itself Cooke Clicker idle type of game:

“I kind of like the idea of having it start off as one thing and then slowly evolve into an idle game. Like, the more you play, the less you play.

“That’s something that one of my artists was talking about: He had this idea about how games were kind of turning into a thing where players just want to play less of the game. Like, Vampire Survivors is all about not playing the game.

“We just thought it was funny.”

For the record, though, Ball x Pit isn’t based on Breakout, nor Arkanoid.