Neverball Coming to a Touch/iPhone Near You

Posted by Eric March on June 29, 2008 at 3:49 am

Lazrhog’s at it again. The guy who ported rRootage is now working on porting a full-on 3D balance game for the iPhone and iPod Touch that will blow you away. The game is called Neverball, and is a port of an open-source game for Mac, Windows and Linux developed by Robert Kooima.

The game is rather like the traditional labyrinth game where you must tilt the floor to move your ball around. In Neverball, the object is collect a set amount of coins as determined for each level, and then guide the ball to the exit. Throughout each level there wll be fences, moving platforms, and other obstacles that will get in your way or make navigating the level difficult, as well as bonus coins that are worth higher amounts to get you closer to your goal faster. If anything, this is a lot like a Super Monkey Ball variant.

Having played the Windows version of the game I can say that the control mechanism takes some getting used to. Tilting the floor is simple enough, but since the camera swivels around to point more or less in the direction the ball is travelling. Worse, your tilt direction (but not its pitch) changes with the camera direction, so it’s really easy to get very disoriented, since most of the time the camera will be pointing in a direction other than the one you’re tilting the floor in, and the changes in tilt make it difficult to get things under control again. What’s more, your ball is pretty bouncy, so when you’re moving with some velocity and you bounce into a fence or obstacle, the sudden shift in direction can leave you scrambling to get your bearings.

An option to play the game in a fixed, possibly zoomed (or zoomable) 3/4 view with swipe controls to rotate the board would make it much easier to control. Perhaps we might see something like this in Lazrhog’s version — one can hope anyway. Just the same though, the graphics look to be superb and pretty faithful to the original (though with lower poly counts) and since you can use the touch to really tilt the board (rather than a mouse to tilt it for you) it ought to make the game much more intuitive.

Lazrhog expects to release the game in about two weeks, but until then you can enjoy a couple of videos below. You can also grab the original game for your computer here so you can get a feel for the game.

Development video
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