What Is “Factory Balls”?
Factory Balls is a puzzle game created and developed by Bart Bonte originally on Flash. Its theming and mechanics are simple on the surface, allowing for a wide range of ages in its target audience. The basic premise of the game is that in each level you are given a plain white ball, a design to recreate, and tools to recreate it (like paint, construction hats, belts, and much more). The type of fun is concentrated in challenge, with an increasing difficulty curve and complexity of subsequent levels to maintain it as players improve.
Factory Balls and Mechanics
Factory Balls is an interesting case in that it relies almost solely on mechanics to create fun. There’s no overarching narrative and levels are linked only by their order and their relative difficulty. Moreover, the only mechanic is using various tools to change the appearance of the ball, with the eventual goal of matching a provided image. This ranges from the simplest stage having you coat the ball in paint, to creating complex patterns by masking paint with construction hats, belts, and literal masks.
Strength in Simplicity
The fun is the journey of going from the starting point (a blank canvas and tools) to the ending point (a ball that matches the image). The lack of other mechanics makes this journey have more clarity to players, the goal is to reach the destination, no matter how difficult. If there was a narrative, for example about being a factory worker who likes to bring the balls they make during break to their children at home, that would shift the player’s focus away from their own journey so that they could follow the characters. Factory Balls is a true back-to-basics game, where it lets its mechanic shine brightly without muddling it down with unnecessary details. Its simplicity is its greatest strength, allowing for the complexity of the puzzles to not become overwhelming.
Room For Improvement
However, I do think a hint system could be beneficial since being unable to solve a puzzle completely halts the gameplay experience. Additionally, some of the actions that the tools cause can be unclear, like in the original Factory Balls where you can use an air pump to fill the ball and make it bigger. The expected size of the ball is hard to tell from the example, which could lead to frustration in more complex puzzles.
