Marble Combat out now on Steam in Early Access for free

March 6, 2019 - Maui Vindevogel - News, Trailers - No Comments

Phantom 8 is back with a brand new game called Marble Combat. This is the studio’s first multiplayer game. It’s available in Early Access on Steam and free to play. Marble Combat will be further developed in an open development style with heavy involvement of the community. It’s very important to the studio that they listen to the feedback of the fans.

Gameplay style
Marble Combat is a physics-based multiplayer game for 2 to 8 players. You compete as magical marbles racing and fighting to dominate capture points and collect power-ups. You pick a combination of four abilities to hinder enemies, boost allies or improve ball control.

Development history
This game started out as a small multiplayer demo pitched internally to the Phantom 8 team. It was just a fun and easy game on which the team wanted to work. It’s supposed to be lighthearted and funny without a long development cycle. It’s an easy concept for a small studio and allows a lot of feedback from the community.

What started out as a ball rolling game, quickly became a bigger project. After fleshing out some of the powers and level design options, a real life marble setting seemed perfect. The art style went from a 1950s-60s retro feel to more toys and references to childhoods.

We had a lot of ideas for where to base the arena (initially a schoolyard), but eventually settled on a kid’s playroom for the initial map. This was because we could add as much detail as we liked with tonnes of inspiration from the toys we used to have as kids. We didn’t initially plan for the map to be this detailed and were expecting to have slightly smaller sparser arenas, but as the game developed, the team felt putting more time into one very detailed map was better as there was room for exploration and extra depth with the powerup mechanics. We have had a tonne of ideas for where we could go with this map and other game modes and we’d like to squeeze in as much in as possible. We decided to go Free to play so that we could get the game out early and just keep adding more content as we go.

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