For this week’s critical play, I played Factory Balls Forever, first developed in 2007 for a game competition and later released as a full game on Windows, iOS, and Android in 2019. Specifically, I played the 25 level trial on Bart Bonte’s website. Factory Balls Forever is a simple puzzle game where the player is tasked with coloring balls into specific patterns. The gameplay is simple and suitable for any player who is willing to spend some time thinking about the puzzles.
In Factory Balls Forever, there are only a few mechanics including: painting the ball, covering parts of the ball, and scraping away some existing paint. There is no rotation and covers can be layered on top of each other. The limited mechanics force players to think around the constraints which leads to great satisfaction when you complete the puzzle, but also great frustration when you can’t solve the puzzle.
When I finished level 24, I felt really satisfied. This was a pretty complicated puzzle where you had to do the steps in a very particular order in order to preserve and overwrite different patterns. After playing 23 prior levels, I had a pretty good understanding of how the mechanics of painting and covering parts of the ball interacted with each other. However, in this particular puzzle, I was stumped for a while. I realized that some of the paint lines were misaligned and that other colors seemed to be in impossible positions. After many tries, both with reordering how I colored the ball as well as the order of how I covered the ball, I eventually came up with the solution. At the moment of success, I felt a wave of relief that I could finally move on and also pride and satisfaction knowing that I had solved the puzzle all by myself.
Level 24 – The yellow square surrounded by purple seemed really hard to get achieve
Level nine caused me great frustration, not necessarily because the puzzle was difficult, but because there seemed to be an extraneous option, the recycle box. In all the levels both before and after level nine, I would have to use every option in order to move onto the next level. Since my mental model of each puzzle included using all the options, I would inevitably clear my progress when I clicked the recycle box during my attempts. There was no feedback from the game that this was the incorrect action, so I spent several tries creating and erasing my process. After several minutes, I searched up a walkthrough for level nine and found out that the puzzle was accomplished without using the recycle bin at all – which helped to update my own mental model.
Level 9 – The recycle box ended up being useless, so it being an option didn’t make any sense
I think one issue of Factory Balls Forever is that there is really no way to know if you are going in the right direction. This generates frustration since players (and myself) get lost and may be reluctant to restart since they might be just a few moves away from beating the level. Essentially, the issue is that there are no hints at all for these puzzles.
Although players can visually check their progress against the goal, the game doesn’t support any way to check how close or far away you are from the goal state. In the above picture of Level 24, I have the entire top half of the ball completed, but in reality, I was about a third of the way there due to how complicated it was to complete the bottom section. Additionally, in the picture below – Level 14, it looks like I’m almost done, but due to not having any way to erase the left coat of paint, I was actually going down the wrong path. I think it would be useful to add a counter for the minimum number of moves necessary for success to let players ballpark how they are doing (either going way over or way under the number).
Level 14 – if only the right hemisphere option was available. I had to restart to complete this level.
The absence of hints is a double edged sword in my opinion. On one hand, it felt really good when I managed to clear a difficult level without any assistance. But on the other hand, I came really close to giving up (level 24) and even did give up (level nine) on some levels. I think the addition of optional hints or other clues would be really helpful for reducing player frustration while still maintaining the sense of accomplishment players feel when completing a level with no additional aids.
