For those of you who haven't followed the TINS competition, this post is about our entry, Ballz!

The game is a platformer with some puzzle elements. You take control of a ball which is genetically modifed by the British secret service. Your mission is to rescue captured British soldiers from a prison in Iran.

This final version fixes some bugs that we found in the compo version after the deadline, most notably a missing level and a slightly bugged level. The bugs were not very severe and the compo version is also fully playable and completable.

Windows version: http://darkbits.org/db-tins07-ballz-final.zip
Source version (linux, etc.): http://darkbits.org/ballz-1.0.tar.gz

If you have problems running the windows version, get this package from microsoft which should install stuff needed for MSVC 8 binaries:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=32BC1BEE-A3F9-4C13-9C99-220B62A191EE&displaylang=en

Obligatory screenshots:

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I did! This. This is really good.

[edit]
Okay, when I first played it this morning, I was half-awake and barely able to make a complete sentence (with words vanishing at will). Now that I've had a nap, I decided to start the game back up. And guess what? I still stand by what I said earlier.

I'm really impressed. You guys gave 110% and your 72hr game is extremely polished, with good gameplay and great design. I played for over an hour and only made my way to level 13 of 19. The difficulty really ramps up around level 10, but that's appropriate for a game that only has so many levels.

The only thing it lacks is a death counter, because I've lost count. Well done.

You guys wrote this in 3 days? From scratch? Bloody hell! This is sterling, and a hell of a lot better than plenty of stuff written in 3 months...

A fantastic effort.

Yeah it is terribly addictive.

I like the way it is , only two button but the game is still nice !

Good work for only 72 hours !

There is a bug with the line endings in the level loading code. On some systems it's alright, but on some other systems (including Linux), there is an '\r' or maybe an '\n' at the end of the line which gets interpreted as tile, and you get an "Tile not found" or something like that Exception.

I don't have the code here right now, but I think you can figure it out. After I fixed it (cut off CR/NL at end of line), the game worked with Linux, too.

I've played to Level 10 yet, I think.

I enjoyed it, it was really done and fairly neat. I did find it a bit too hard for my liking and I also stopped playing at level 10.

The song reminded me off the batman song from the NES, and according to wikipedia, that game is supposed to have some of the best NES music ever so I guess that would make it a compliment.

Good job.

Oh, that's good. I've just tried that and I must say that it's really original idea. For 72 hrs game really polished. You did a whole lot of work. Congratulations.

It made it to The Independent Gaming Source thanks to Zaphos, check it out.