Latest Release:
Beta 1.5

Latest Media:

Beta 1.5 of Ballmen is now available for download! 1.5 includes three new maps from our custom mapping community: pamingo, hyroquasium, and fallsafe, as well as early custom sounds. The majority of this update is in bugfixes and balancing, so you'll notice a lot of little tweaks and generally better overall stability. Not much has changed visually (but will in the future, rest assured) so we don't have much media to flaunt, but the following screens were taken during internal playtesting, and you can view gameplay videos in our media section. Changelog:
- [BUGFIX] Greatly improved stability of the client and server
- [BUGFIX] Improved wallwalking code, fixing problems
- [BUGFIX] Fixed certain entities crashing the game
- [TWEAK] Increased energy regen
- [TWEAK] Added delay to Beam fire
- [TWEAK] Increased ROF and tracking of Nailgun
- [TWEAK] Reduced star spawn time in Scavenger Hunt from 1 min to 20 sec
- [TWEAK] Doubled the countdown time of Doomsday and increased its damage
- [ADDITION] Replaced a number of weapon sounds with custom ones
- [ADDITION] New maps: hyroquasium, fallsafe, and pamingo
- [ADDITION] Servers can specify the min/max players and gamemode for map
- [ADDITION] New entities: info_direction, func_gravity_control, and trigger_force

A list of download mirrors for both the client and server files can be found here. Please report any bugs or suggestions you have on our forum. The next release version of Ballmen is already under development and will have more gameplay and content additions than this one. Keep on Ballin!

Beta 1.5 will be available for download on Sunday, April 20th, three days from now. In addition to general gameplay improvements and balancing, Beta 1.5 features several new maps, early custom weapon sounds, and many bugfixes. Stay tuned!

As you can see, the website has changed, thanks to a new layout by our newest team member Ennui. With the new website comes more media - new screenshots, and a Ballmen tutorial video by forumite Ducksauce and his group Cubical Studios. Also, our forums have moved from their old location to a new place here (thanks Reima for hosting us!), so update your bookmarks accordingly. You'll have to re-register, but this server will work much better than the free hosting solution we used before. The old forum will remain for archival purposes. Development of Ballmen is coming along well - stick around for more news and media soon, including information about the upcoming Beta 1.5!

It's been about a week since our first release and things are going very well. A number of maps have already been created by our players that easily surpass the quality of the maps in the release, and many more are on the way. We've gotten a lot of feedback about bugs, possible improvements, and some very interesting feature requests that we're hoping to be able to address in the future releases.

The following is list of some of the things we plan to include in future releases:

A new death effect. Instead of ragdolling, or perhaps after ragdolling, the constituent parts of the player model will fly apart and bounce around for a bit. This is something I've been thinking about for a while and I think it will make the players feel much more like Ballmen.

A CTF type gamemode. We haven't ironed out the specifics of this yet and we'll probably be discussing this on the forums when it comes time to implement it.

Improved energy regeneration. One of the biggest complaints so far has been that energy runs out too quickly and too often, and players are forced to run away from a fight in order to regenerate. To remedy this, instead of always regenerating at a constant rate, energy will regenerate significantly faster when the player is low. This should allow players to always be able to continue a fight if they so choose, while still requiring them to be mindful of their energy if they want to extensively use the more powerful weapons.

Many new maps. Since maps for Ballmen don't require (and probably shouldn't have) as much detail as maps for other games or mods, making maps takes considerably less time. As such, a number of very original and fun maps have already been released by our players and more are on the way. For those that were frustrated by the numbr of sucides caused by "falling out" of the map, there will also be some maps which will be completely closed, and thus impossible to fall out of.

Many tweaks and bugfixes. We've gotten a number of suggestions on how to improve the UI of the mod(i.e. making it easier to read off the health/energy level) and a number of bugs that don't warrant their own bullets but are important nonetheless.

The first beta version of Ballmen is available to the public. Download it here. Please post bugs, suggestions, or feedback on our forum.

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