Project status: Finished – Occasional Updates
Download: iOS App Store

Send me feedback or report a bug!

About Ball Is Life

Ball Is Life is the first iOS game that I built and released on my own.

I had previously programmed other extremely simple games by following YouTube videos step by step, however this was the first project where I came up with the concept, programmed the entire thing without step by step instructions, and actually released it on the App Store.

Game objective

In Ball Is Life, you play as a ball (surprise!), controlled by a joystick.

Your ball is either cyan or orange, and your goal is to hunt the smaller balls of your color while avoiding those of the opposite color. But beware, your ball will swap colors at random times to keep things interesting!

Development

It took me around a year to develop Ball Is Life, due in large part to the fact that I was pretty much completely new to programming.

Stack Overflow was instrumental in the development process, as I was looking up how to do basically everything, especially in the beginning. Overtime though, I actually began understanding how different pieces of the code I was writing fit together.

A year and a half after the initial release, I went back to add power-ups and clean up some of the code. Using some of what I’d learned about functions and parameters, I managed to shave off several hundred lines of code—which greatly improved readability.

About 6 months after the power-ups update (early 2018), I added Game Center support and Admob integration, both of which I had learned how to implement while developing Tartarus: The Abyss, and Rainbow Reaction.

Since Ball Is Life’s release in January of 2016, I have learned so much that if I were to build the same game again, I estimate that I could now (at the time of writing) do it in under a month.

Play it yourself

If you are interested in checking it out, you can download Ball Is Life here.