Ball Legends Overview
In Ball Legends, players compete for eliminations by bouncing a deadly, auto-targeting ball between each other. Players deflect incoming balls using a sword and special abilities they earn as they progress. The game was inspired by the Overwatch mod, Genji Ball, and popular Roblox game, Blade Ball. Ball Legends adds to the battle-royale-style genre with the addition of 3 new game modes.
Time Spent on Project: 8 weeks
Platforms: Roblox (Phone, Tablet, Desktop)
Ryan’s Roles: Game designer, programmer, & producer
Summary of Contributions
As the co-creator of Ball Legends, Ryan was responsible for all tasks outside of creative direction and asset creation:
Game Design: Ryan developed all gameplay for Ball Legends. This included combat, game mode, and progression system design
Programming: Utilizing the Pixel Miner’s software framework, Ryan was able to take Ball Legends from prototype to release build in just 6 weeks
Production & QA: Ryan managed both programming and art asset production timelines for the game. He also led QA through regular playtests during development and player feedback post-release
Continue reading for more information on the team’s development strategy.
Genre Selection & Concept Development
Ball Legends was created as a test project Balanced Games could use to assess the failures of Pixel Miners’ marketing campaign. With CPI 15x higher than expected, the theory at the time was that the mining simulator genre no longer resonated with the Roblox market. Developing and marketing an MVP in a genre we had high confidence in would help the team determine the root cause of Pixel Miners’ difficult release and allow the team to test a new product during the process.
Based on market size and execution difficulty, 9 popular genres were assessed:
The Blade Ball genre was selected because of its large market size, low number of competitors, and ease of development with a small team. The genre had only 3 significant titles at the time and little variation in gameplay mechanics. The fast-paced battle royale gameplay made the genre frustrating for younger and mobile players. The team saw an opportunity to attract these users with respawn mechanics and team-based gameplay objectives.
Production
The team learned a great deal about increasing production speed while developing Pixel Miners. With a better understanding of the team’s workflows and a more structured approach to creating production timelines, an MVP was developed in just 6 weeks. Ryan continued to work closely with the game’s co-creator to ensure all assets were created on time and bug-free.
One important insight the team learned from production was the difficulty inherent in QA testing a large multiplayer game with a team of only 3 developers. We had to rely heavily on community feedback during the first few days after release in order to identify multiple critical bugs. This led to a pause in our initial marketing campaign in order to improve the user experience.
User Acquisition & Results
The team significantly improved average CTR from 0.24% for Pixel Miners to 0.93% for Ball Legends by using higher contrast marketing art and focusing on US mobile users. Average conversion rate increased from 0.043% to 0.26%. For the game’s best campaign, a 1.9% CTR and 0.6% conversion rate was achieved. However, user acquisition continued to be the most significant barrier to success for Balanced Games:
1. Ball Legends was designed for 16 players and is only playable with at least 2. With an average CPI of $0.16 USD, the game was unable to gain sufficient concurrent user counts to sustain active servers at all times. This led to very low average playtimes and a significant number of new users dropping off while waiting for other players.
2. Desktop advertising remained prohibitively expensive. With the genre’s competitive, fast-paced gameplay, the game provided a much higher quality experience on desktop. However, with Roblox’s removal of most of their browser-based advertising spots in 2021 and significantly lower CTRs on desktop, acquiring these users was too expensive given the game’s budget.
While Ball Legends was unsuccessful in creating a stable playerbase, the team learned a lot about marketing new titles on Roblox. With the game’s best icon generating a 2x greater CTR than its lowest performing icon, important color and style best practices were established for future campaigns. The vast differences in acquisition costs between desktop and mobile users led to a focus on mobile-first gameplay in order to succeed on a small marketing budgets.
Unfortunately, due to budget constraints, the Balanced Games development team was dissolved after the conclusion of Ball Legends production. Ryan continued to develop solo on Roblox in 2024 in an effort to establish a viable business model able to support a team in the long-term. Using the lessons learned from Pixel Miners Beta and Ball Legends marketing campaigns, Ryan later achieved a 1.6% conversion rate with his game, Obby in a Ball, and successfully marketed Pixel Miners to achieve 2,500 peak concurrent users.