A bit of back story and how this game came to be.

My name is Chris Cannavo and I am making a game called Grav My Balls. I am doing a lot of crazy things right now because I have not been this invested in my own art and ideas in a long time. This game has been in development for over a year now from concept to demo. It has been a small group effort of me and my friends. We have all been developing games for a while and helping each other with our own independent projects and concepts. I will not claim to be a solo dev because my projects have typically started from something I wanted to make and my friends have guided, helped, and heavily contributed to it. And as I have learned from past projects, game development is fucking hard. There is a tremendous amount of work that goes into them. I like to say that game development will give you the highest highs and lowest lows. When something you built has issues it can feel devastating but it’s quite the opposite when something works. When things are working, It always brings a smile to my face and it makes me feel like I can keep going and make cooler stuff. It’s a wonderful feeling to see things coming together and even better when it’s fun.

I have wanted to work in video games since I started animating in 3D. I have been passionate about games for most of my life and I wanted to make something that I would like to play. I have grand ideas for a character action game called Slotter. It was the idea that got me interested in learning how to make them myself and not just contribute art even though I would like that to be my focus. I started work on an idea but it was very art driven too. I wanted to learn the process of the art creation of characters from start to finish. I was currently learning Zbrush and I was sculpting, then modeling, rigging, and animating for my game idea. Then when it came to the code, I did my best to basically reverse engineer a bunch of youtube knowledge together to put together my game. I am getting better at the coding aspect thanks to my friends but it is my slowest to learn skill. We have a working version of this concept but then it turned into a slow burn. It is basically a very ambitious idea that would take a lot of time and money. This is not something I can do alone so the progress was slow. 

My good friend Udon Engineering made a game as a gift and it was amazing. A simple and thoughtful concept with a very focused amount of dev time. I was really impressed with what he was able to make. It inspired me to try to think of a game concept that was simple but also fun. Something that could be made in a reasonable amount of time and done with limited resources. Also, something that I could make. Not to say that I wanted to try and tackle it all on my own but it would be something that I could hold myself up to as an equal. That being said, I still need a good amount of help on code but I am getting better each time I focus. 

I started with a first person template and did something I know how to do. Flip a checkbox in code! When you shoot the gun, it turns off gravity on the object you hit. This was the first thing done on Grav My Balls. After that the idea kept growing. Turning gravity off and on was the start and more ideas came naturally just from playing around with the idea. The ideas got crazier as I started to make levels around this concept. More ideas kept building until it is what you can play today. Little things and gameplay frustrations would turn into tools, mechanics and thoughts about how to make the game better. The concept of lock balls and grab balls were all born from overshooting objects you hit before. Instead of trying to catch up to an object that went past where you wanted it, you could freeze it in place and then pull it right back over. It is fun to just watch the objects you hit fly around the level. I have “something” with this game. I want to make it the best game I can while making it the game I want to make.