Nuclex

The Game

This game is freeware!
Click to download Ball Race

Ball Race is a fun dexterity game I did to get acquainted with Microsoft XNA Game Studio. You have to guide a small metal ball through wooden mazes, but instead of controlling the ball, you control the maze!

By tilting the maze, you make the ball roll to one side or the other. But as the ball quickly gains momentum, it's not as easy as it sounds to navigate around the obstacles. Excellent physics make the game behave as if you had a real, physical version of the game before you.

Challenge mode provides 10 interesting levels that you can play against the clock. Each level has been tested and fine-tuned with great care to provide an interesting challenge to the player.

But the real trump is the option to build your own levels using a simple text editor such as notepad! Simply save your levels in a special folder of the game and you will see them in the level selector to compete against your friends :)

Modding

Creating a custom level for Ball Race is easier than it seems! You just need to create a simple text file and draw the maze using Ascii characters.

Take a look at this example level:

Title=Test
Difficulty=1
GoalTime=00:01:15
###############
#O            #
# + +-+-+-+-+ #
# |    O      #
# + +-+-+ + +-#
# |       |   #
# +-+-+ + + + #
#     | | | |O#
#-+-+ + + + + #
#       | | | #
# + +-+-+ + + #
#F|       |   #
# + +-+-+ +-+ #
#        O|S  #
###############

The first three lines define some common properties of the level. Title is for the name you want to give to your level. Originally this was planned to be visible in the level selector, but the concept was dumped. The second line defines the difficulty level on a scale from 1 to 3. The third line is the time you want to give the player to finish the maze.

The maze itself should be pretty obvious. It needs to be rectangular and has to be surrounded by a box of '#' characters that will make up the outline of the board. Walls are created by drawing lines with the '-', '|' and '+' characters. Be careful, thought, because you can only place those characters at every second row and column. The reason for this is that the game uses a grid that alternates between small tiles (for walls) and large tiles (for floors or holes.)

The following special characters can be placed on the floor pieces:

• ' ' (space) - Normal floor plate the ball can roll over

• 'O' (big o, not a zero) - Hole trap for the ball

• 'S' - Starting point. Has to occur exactly once

• 'F' - Finish hole, can appear as often as you want

If your level contains an error, the game will output a clear and precise error message and tell you where and what you did wrong. It's best to develop new level step-by-step: Create your outline, place start and finish, then test it. Put some walls in, test again. Place a few holes, test anew. And so on.

Levels have to be placed in the Levels folder of the game and need to obtain the extension .maze.txt. For example, your level could be stored as
C:\Program Files\Nuclex\Ball Race\Levels\My.maze.txt.

Be careful, some windows editors smuggle in duplicate extensions, eg. your file might be called My.maze.txt.txt if you explicitly type .maze.txt in your text editor. Also make sure the file is saved as Ascii characters. The game cannot read word documents or html pages ;)

Screenshots

Highscores

Download

Nuclex Ball Race is Freeware! You can download the full game, play it and give it to your friends.

Note that Ball Race requires the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 to be installed. Windows Vista and later operating systems already include .NET, Windows XP users may have to download and install .NET.

The installer may, upon asking the user, update your DirectX runtime and install the XNA runtime files.

BallRace Game without .NET
Nuclex BallRace Installer

BallRace source code archive for XNA Game Studio 3.1
Nuclex BallRace Sources (7-Zip)