Response:
For this critical play, I played Factory Balls by Bart Bonte Games. It is a flash web-browser game made for casual gamers who enjoy puzzles. In the game you have a blank ball and various items such as buckets of paint, bags of seeds, masks, hats, belts, and more. Using these items you must decorate the ball to match the demo-ball that you are shown. The game typically takes 30 seconds to a couple minutes per level depending on how stumped you are. There are 25 free levels, but then you must pay if you want the 200+ levels that come with the full version.
How the puzzle works: Here we can see me completing level 4. We first color the ball black, then we add the goggles and put red over top of those. Then we add the sleeping mask and color the ball black on top of that. We can then remove the sleeping mask and then the goggles to get the desired ball from the start.
In this game, there are a few simple mechanics, clicking to put something on the ball, and having the paint/seed cover everything that isn’t covered. These are really the two primary mechanics, and by keeping it simple, the game allows users to learn quickly while keeping anupside to how difficult you can make the levels. Since this is a non-zero-sum game, the puzzles must be interesting enough to keep users coming back as there is no competition between players – and so far the puzzles have done that. Although there are only 2-3 mechanics, they can build on one another to get extremely complicated. While levels at the start just have a couple clicks, I am currently on level 13 and cannot figure it out to save my life. The mechanics also work hand in hand with the aesthetics of the game. The game has a simple white background, and all the items are circled in a teal color, this makes the clickable options pop so that the game is very intuitive and shows the “magic circle” of what is and isn’t part of the game quite literally and clearly. The aesthetics also include some music in the background as well as simple shaped things that have realistic skins to be as clear as possible on what they are. There isn’t a story, or at least hasn’t been one in the free version. I think this helps keep the same simple vibe that the mechanics and aesthetics add to. While I am a big fan of narrative usually, with puzzle games it can sometimes feel like an unnecessary add-on. If I had to read text between every level of Factory Balls or Candy Crush, I would be deterred from playing as much. So I think going the route of just being a puzzle game and staying in that lane was a great choice. I do think it would be helpful to have hints somewhere that the player can get access to. This is always a nice feature of puzzle games, when the user can get hints from a button; so that users who don’t want “spoilers” or hints don’t have to deal with them, but they are readily accessible for those that do. Since the game doesn’t have them, it can leave the player feeling a little lost at times. I think the only other thing I would change is the images used for items. The box and ball design are fairly cartoonish and I think that vibe fits the game very well. But all of the items are almost photo-realistic and there seems to be a slight artistic clash. I would recommend making some more cartoon versions of the items (paint buckets, belts, hats, etc.) so that the game feels more unified on the art front. However, overall this was very fun and I did enjoy playing!
Ethics:
This game has a few founding assumptions that it makes of players. One, that all players can see color perfectly fine since many of the levels deal with paint and matching colors. And two, that players understand physics/logic of how paint would cover a ball when another thing is placed on that ball. However, I think this second assumption is pretty generic and that everyone I know would pick up on this logic very quickly. The colors could be more of an issue. Many of the colors are red or yellow, so there isn’t direct red-green colorblindness going on, but dealing with multiple colors at a time could still be confusing. The game could maybe pivot to having patterned paints as well, so that all red paint has horizontal stripes, and yellow paint has vertical stripes or something like that. Besides this color issue, the game does a great job at not making assumptions about the players, and being as open as possible for everyone to play it.
