Please follow me and take a look into the design and development of DDI Games Habitrail: Hamsterball. I spoke with CEO & Founder of the company Stewart Green, to get an inside behind the scenes look at what got the ball rolling.

It’s been over ten years since the release of Habitrail: Hamsterball for the Playstation2 and Wii home consoles, so Stewart’s memory was a little foggy over some of the more intricate facts. I conducted a short interview with him to see what he can remember about the bane of my life, and he was kind enough to answer my questions.

Hi Stewart, thanks for your time.

Where did the inspiration for the game come from? When did it hit you that you had the right idea for it?

There have been many ball-rolling games on many formats, back to marble madness of 8-bit consoles, or even the pre-computer physical wooden marbles rolling between pegs. We realized that the tilt and gyroscope controls of the Wii controller would be a lot more intuitive to the tilt and roll control than any keyboard/keypad. We were a small team of developers, without a large budget, unable to afford advertising and promotion so we could not afford to create a huge detailed game like SEGA’s Monkeyball so we aimed to provide an affordable budget title. When games were $60 new, we were releasing them for only $20. They were meant to be simple, fun games that were affordable for a family, so we ensured that the title was usable by up to 4 users at once, which then imposed more restrictions on the quality of the game, as four players in split screen takes up nearly 4 times the processing time, so compromises on detail were made to keep the game family friendly and still affordable.

What was the reasoning behind not assigning all of the buttons on the controller? 

The control of the ball is with the tilt of the controller, there is very little else you need to do, movement is through speed direction and inertia, if we had needed to do other actions we would have used a free button, the buttons that were used for camera orientation were from user feedback, no tester ever requested any additional action was needed.

Even the easy mode can be incredibly difficult, at some points seemingly impossible. Was this intentional?

No, I am surprised you found this was too hard, we had the testers rate each level for their opinion on difficulty and then arranged them from easy to hard, we had school children play the games and also got their feedback, the number of levels were modified when players got proficient or found quick cheats for a level, or found them too hard, but by the end no one complained about the difficulty. We could easily of changed them if that was the case.

In the multiplayer level ‘Snake’, if you fall off at the beginning there is a pair of yellow  eyes watching from the corner of the attic. What are these supposed to be?

I don’t specifically remember thus being put in, but with a name like snake, it might be an artist’s humour to add snake eyes.

Can the fans hold out any hope for a sequel?

Unfortunately not, we aimed to make low cost affordable games for families and initially we were successful. However at such a low retail cost and high manufacturing costs to Nintendo, we made only a couple of pounds on each unit sold. The rise in popularity of second hand games and their low cost meant that users could buy games for less than we could manufacture games from Nintendo. We no longer write any console games, and we can’t afford the millions that large licensed games cost.  Our initial idea of low cost gaming has been taken over by mobile gaming with free to play games. I am glad to see so many great free to play games, when we launched our low cost games the industry was saying games would only be made by large companies, 500+ team members taking up to 5 years to develop big games which would cost a fortune. I am glad that small team affordable games by indie developers are making a comeback.

I’d like to thank Stewart for having the time to answer my questions. I’d also like to thank those testers and school children who played such a pivotal part in the frustration that would ensue 10 years into the future.

You can read the Habitrail: Hamsterball Review Here