Screenshots
Watch trailer on Steam ↗A Nice Game About Balls
Thumb Flame Games · Published by Thumb Flame Games · Official site ↗
Last updated 28 Sept 2026
In "A Nice Game About Balls", you’ll use your wits, your cunning, and some expertly timed buffs to roll your balls to sweet, sweet victory. Plot your trajectory, avoid obstacles, set up traps, and knock your opponents out of contention. Finally, earn the respect of both your opponents and peers.
Indie, Strategy, Casual, Sports · More free games
Navigate through strategic challenges as you roll your balls to victory, using cunning and expert timing. Outsmart your rivals by setting up traps and avoiding obstacles in this engaging indie sports experience.
About this game
In "A Nice Game About Balls", you’ll use your wits, your cunning, and some expertly timed buffs to roll your balls to sweet, sweet victory.
Plot your trajectory, avoid the obstacles, set up traps, and knock your opponents out of contention.
Earn yourself points, new buffs, and the respect of your opponents as you forge your way through this skill-based, kinda-tactical, kinda-deckbuilding, roguelite-ish, physics-based, spherical adventure.
Balls... hopes to provide some chill, skill-based satisfaction, some highs, some lows, and some weirdness thrown in for good measure.
Disclaimer: this game is a work in progress, and features may change a bit. 👍
Start a campaign, choose your route, earn points, collect cards, and deploy game-winning buffs.
In a head-to-head match, they get 3 balls, and you get 3 balls. May the best ball slinger win.
Fight your way past the underlings and take on the area bosses! They don’t always play fair, but remember that the bosses can be a bit touchy and winning means a lot to them, so be nice.
Some opponents are just naturally better than you, and that sucks. To even things out, you can collect buff cards and deploy them at the perfect time to give yourself the advantage - wiping that smug, self-satisfied look from your foe’s face.
Fighting your way through a full competitive campaign can be challenging, so instead, you can unlock chilled skill levels. No opponents, no limitations, just keep rolling the balls until you make an awesome shot you can upload to the internet and you become a huge celebrity.
For each level unlocked, ‘A Nice Game About Balls’ allows you to replay it locally against a friend, family member, or a pet, maybe. Just roll some balls and do your best. We’re all friends here.
Oh, but it’s unlikely to be an online mode because there’s no way in hell I can afford that.
For each game played, your score will be recorded, and a judgment will be provided. Why settle for an F grade when you can play again and get a C? Works for me.
To be honest, I haven’t completely figured everything out yet, so I may have better ideas at some point. Who can say!
NOTE: Development is in the early stages, so the screenshots and videos here are a work-in-progress - expect things to change!
System Requirements
Will my PC run this? →Minimum
- OS: Windows 10
- Processor: Intel Core i3
- Memory: 2 GB RAM
- Graphics: Relatively modern dedicated graphics card (Vulkan support required)
- Storage: 200 MB available space
Supported Languages
Latest news
AnnouncementsOfficial
I made 2 CPUs play my game and they sucked.
Creating CPU opponents (and having them play each other) is a very handy way to test out new levels, but they do tend to be quite chaotic. Click below!Read full article on Community Announcements (ThumbFlameGames)AnnouncementsOfficial
Preview of new demo level
I've recently put together another demo level (to be playable within the demo). Here are 2 minutes of footage to get a feel for it. Click below!Read full article on Community Announcements (thathurtabit)AnnouncementsOfficial
Devlog #7 - Store, Localisation, and Big ol’ Refactor
Hullo friends, your friendly neighbourhood BALLS developer here, giving you a quick update which is hopefully less panicked than what I wrote previously.So yeah, what’s been going down?The Big RefactorI’ve already learned a huge amount whilst attempting this solo-game-dev thing, largely because I’m doing everything for the first time.My biggest code change was breaking down my application architecture into a more Humble Object pattern. This seems like a good fit for indie (or small) game development, particularly when working with an established game engine (in my case, Godot). Why, tho? Well, because game development is complicated. Game engines do the best they can to provide as much necessary functionality as possible (which is awesome, thank you for that) - but you’re essentially building a complicated application on top of another complicated application (one that you didn’t write).This means you have to trust that the engine (and its much-smarter-than-me) development teams are doing their part, and you have to make sure you’re structuring your own code in a sensible (and testable) way.Essentially, you’ll want to keep your main Godot nodes (objects with Godot engine functionality baked in) as “humble” as possible, abstracting all your own logic away to pure objects (POCO - Plan Old CLR Objects in my case).The reason is that these simpler classes are agnostic of whichever framework they might be used; they don’t need to care, and are therefore easier to reason about, and most importantly, unit-testable. Anyway, I’ve gone from having a few scattered NUnit tests to having 800+. That’s not to say unit tests will cover all potential problems (they absolutely won’t), but they do give a stronger foundation to build upon.Localisation Something I’ve never really had to consider before, coming from a web development (i.e. modern browsers) background, is localisation. Web browsers will know your preferred language and try to automatically translate web pages, whereas game...Read full article on Community Announcements (thathurtabit)AnnouncementsOfficial
Devlog #6 - “For the right reasons”
Friends! It’s that time again, when I realise I should probably write a quick, pithy blog update about “A Nice Game About Balls” because I have, in fact, forgotten to do that.So what’s been going down in game dev town? A Boss! Kinda!For the demo (more below), I’ve added an ‘interim’ boss. Players won’t directly engage with the boss at this point, but he’ll be there, being a nuisance to the players. He should be an imposing figure throughout exhibition matches.Demo-specific UI!Admittedly, this is very boring, but I’ve had to rethink how the demo (again, more below) vs. full game will work, re: user interactions and progress measurements/scoring. I’ve had to rebuild the main menu, and sub menus, and... that’s boring! But, kinda important! There’s no use adding lots of cool game features if people can’t even get to the game.The long, painful slog to a playable demo!As green as I am regarding game dev, I’ve incorrectly thought - not just once - that “after this next bug, tweak, feature... I should be ready to release an early demo!” and then I realise how far away I am from that.I’ve heard people say both: “get your game in front of people as quickly as possible!” and also: “don’t put a buggy, broken game in front of people, you idiot”. I’m kinda erring more towards the latter in my current thinking.It’s difficult enough to get people to play your game, so why treat them to a crappy experience? Would I look forward to playing the full version of a game where the demo was shoddy / broken? Likely not - unless it had enough that I could really see what the game devs are aiming for (and what they are aiming for is cool).So yeah, I still don’t really know how far away I am from a demo. I’d say at least 80-90% of the way there? Yet there are many things I haven’t really considered, such as: localisation, audio-levelling, etc. etc. etc. oh, and... marketing?Marketing panicI’ve been focusing - I think correctly - on getting my game in a playable demo state, but I tend to read t...Read full article on Community Announcements (thathurtabit)AnnouncementsOfficial
Devlog #5 - The Gift Goose Cometh
NOTE: This post was originally published on my blog in December 2025Hello again, internet! I intended to write a quick update every month, but I guess I’ve been having so much fun bug fixing and feature creeping that I forgot to provide an update in November. Oh well.Anyway, what’s been going on? Let’s break it down into bits that I can remember.An actual Steam page! It's been up for a while, as the screenshots on my Steam page already look a bit old and out of date - which is good, as that means progress, right? Anyway, please wishlist because it makes me feel good. Thank you so much and so kindly.Give it a look!Sound effects!I’d heard that adding sound effects to your game instantly makes it way more fun - and huh - that’s totally correct. I created a handy SFXManager global and a big ol’ list of sound effect references, and now I can quickly add sounds at various events throughout my game, from UI / user feedback to all the different physics events that can occur in-game. Ok, maybe not all, but I’m working on it.I’ve snagged some low-cost audio assets during recent sale which I’ve made use of, and also used my mic to record some random voice stuff myself. Fun.I get that sound effects are probably considered ‘polish’, and I shouldn’t really delve too deeply into that yet, as there’s still critical functionality to improve, but screw it - it’s given me a confidence boost that the game can be quite fun to play.Googly eyes and vomit! I did this recently, so I can actually remember it. For reference, a while back, I added a ‘chompy’ mouth hazard to the game, where players’ balls can get chomped (this still feels odd to say), but after adding randomly spawned obstacles (more below) I realised the chompy mouth can actually gobble those up too, causing physics glitches (which are kinda funny, but probably make the gameplay too unpredictable).To get around this, my chompy mouth now chokes up and spits out any non-player-ball objects it has swallowed up. This works well be...Read full article on Community Announcements (thathurtabit)
