Crusher Ball

"Crusher Ball." A confusing iPhone accelerometer roller ball game from 2010 with terrible programmer art.

The game is quite simple. It is an arcade-style game where humanoids spawn and run toward an exit. Your objective is to crush them with the ball before they reach the exit. There are other enemies that attack the ball. You can avoid or destroy these enemies.

Originally written for the iPhone 3G, I published this game in October 2010. I released it for $1 initially and hardly anyone bought it, so I released it for free and it started getting thousands of downloads, but nobody understood it. I did manage to get a few of my friends addicted to it briefly. I left it up for a couple years but eventually I got sick of paying $100 annually to Apple for this free game which nobody played.

This is one of the last programs I wrote in C++. I did not use an existing game engine, so I had to do basically everything myself (physics, collision detection, asset loading including models and textures). It used OpenGL for rendering. There was a thin layer of Objective-C that was used to launch the game on the iPhone. During development I also had a desktop version of the game that used SDL. On desktop you would tilt using mouse movement. Previously I never released this desktop version.

Last night I decided to dig this game up and compile it. Fortunately it was not very hard to port it from SDL 1.2 to SDL 2. I already had an old Visual Studio project for the game, so it was not difficult to get it to compile. So here the game is, the desktop version in its original form. Sadly, the iPhone version cannot easily be resurrected since Apple deprecated OpenGL support on their platforms several years ago.

If I remember correctly there are 40 levels in the game. To my knowledge nobody has ever beaten the game (not even myself).