Copyright escapistmagazine
There’s a certain madness at the heart of Ball x Pit. It’s a game that feels like it’s constantly on the verge of collapse — seemingly thousands of balls pinging about in what seems like ridiculous chaos — and yet, somehow, you almost always feel in control. That sensation, according to Brooklyn-based creator Kenny Sun, wasn’t carefully engineered. “99% happy accident,” he laughs. That might be the perfect summary of how Ball x Pit came together: a project driven by instinct rather than spreadsheets or strict design documents. “I don’t think anything really was nailed down when I started,” he says. “I usually design by intuition, constantly playing and adjusting based on feel. Even the characters were designed on the fly, just when ideas came to me.” That spontaneous process has long defined Sun’s work, which has evolved from the hypnotic loops of Circa Infinity to the gleeful absurdity of Ball x Pit. He’s not precious about structure or spoilers either. “Generally, I don’t care about spoiling people on the game,” he says. “For this kind of game, especially, I don’t think there’s anything really worth hiding.” It’s all about discovery, chaos, and the joy of watching systems collide. Not everything survived the journey, though. “There was a pretty extensive pet system I cut,” Sun admits, “but I don’t think it’ll make a comeback.” The ideas that do make it in tend to serve the rhythm of the experience — the hypnotic feedback loop that keeps players glued to the screen, somewhere between mastery and mayhem and I am not sure which is closer. While Ball x Pit bears Sun’s unmistakable fingerprints, it wasn’t a completely solo effort. The project became a team affair under the banner “Kenny Sun and Friends,” with each contributor leaving a clear mark. “They all deserve a shout-out,” he says, running through the list with visible appreciation. There’s Sergio “Bini” Alcelay, who handled all the 3D models for the base-building section; Fernando Labarta Martin, who crafted the shaders and effects; Mohammed Bakir Khawam, who built the pixel art textures; Lisa Fasol, who created the environmental concepts; Luka Parascandalo, who designed the icons and UI; and composer Amos Roddy, whose soundtrack “was amazing — and he gave me a lot of advice and feedback on the sound design.” The game’s origins, interestingly, have little to do with the classics it superficially resembles. “Arkanoid itself wasn’t really an inspiration,” Sun explains. “Punball was the game I played that directly influenced its creation… though I wouldn’t recommend it.” The real breakthrough came when he decided to turn Ball x Pit from a turn-based experiment into real-time chaos — something closer to Vampire Survivors. “That’s what really made it click,” he says. Other influences crept in too: “I took cues from Loop Hero and Cult of the Lamb for the base building element.” For Sun, the game’s success has been a double-edged sword. “I’m glad to have found success after over 10 years of doing this,” he says. “But there’s some guilt. The positive-seeming words that people use — ‘addictive’, ‘dopamine rush’, ‘problem’ — don’t make me feel like I’ve made something that has had a positive impact on the world. There are a lot of people making cooler things that actually try to push the medium forward that deserve the same level of success.” A Switch 2 version is already on the way, though Sun himself isn’t deeply involved in the port. “From what I’ve heard, the biggest challenge for most other devs is actually just getting a dev kit,” he says. “We were lucky to have access to one.” When he’s not tinkering with physics or spinning a prototype into something unreasonably compelling, Sun says his gaming tastes are wide-ranging. “I generally try to play a bit of everything,” he says. “Nothing specific that I really gravitate to.” If Ball x Pit is anything to go by, that eclecticism pays off — a dozen influences colliding, mutating, and bouncing off each other until something brilliant emerges from the chaos. Or, as Sun might put it: another happy accident. Ball x Pit is available now and you absolutely should be playing it.
