Happy Ball was in his Happy Place, a small-ish and quiet spot that wasn’t too near to any major air traffic lanes and smelt faintly of heather as long as the wind was blowing in the right direction. He wasn’t feeling particularly happy however, because a quiet afternoon of grinning like a psychopath and gently bouncing around had been utterly ruined by the arrival of a Big Happy Ball which had decided to muscle in and take over Happy Ball’s air space!

Anyone who has ever been deluged with emails about packs of new smilies is about to find out where the little… darlings come from; the Big Happy Ball, a genetically-enhanced killing machine that just happens to grin a lot, is able to churn out potentially lethal smilies at a truly hideous rate (think of the queen creature in Aliens and assume it’s an evening when she can’t find anything even half decent on the telly) which Happy Ball must deal with to defend himself whilst giving the Big Happy Ball a good and solid if somewhat metaphorical kicking. And Happy Ball isn’t defenseless either, because like the Big Happy Ball he too can produce a stream of smaller Happy Balls which can be utilised as artillery.

[View with PicLens]

And so the war begins to rage in the skies above this once peaceful land… oh lets face it, this story is just a load of balls!

HOW YOU CAN HELP HAPPY BALL TO BE TRULY HAPPY
Happy Ball is moved using the cursor keys on your computer’s keyboard and holding down the Z key will make him spew forth vengeance, or at least lots of little Happy Balls. The only other control you’ll need to remember is the space bar, which is used to start a game from the title page. The scoring multiplier (located to the right of the score) is based on shooting multiple Happy Balls of the same type, destroying them in sequence to increase the counter and moving on to another colour of Happy Ball for whatever reason will reset it (the exception in that case being the Big Happy Ball, it doesn’t increment or reset the multiplier).

The Big Happy Ball starts off in the centre of the Happy Place (with Happy Ball above it) and it moves around and fires pretty much as it sees fit, this is the primary target and the game is over (with a nice score bonus awarded) when it’s destroyed. Each enemy type is colour coded and has a unique property:

Yellow :: Big Happy Ball The smiley mothership, Big Happy Ball is large and spawns all of the enemy balls within the game; this is what has usurped Happy Ball and his overall objective is to dispose of it.

Grey :: Mine Ball As the name might suggest, Mine Balls are similar to land or sea mines; they’re launched, decelerate to a stop and sit there. They’re detonated if Happy Ball gets too close or when their fuse runs down – different waves of Mine will have different fuse lengths! If they detonate, smaller balls will be thrown out like shrapnel.

Red :: Speeder Ball These are disgorged and simply fly in a fixed direction at a fixed speed until they’re out of the Happy Place.

Blue :: Reverser Ball After being launched, this enemy decelerates to a stop before reversing direction and accelerating back where it came from; again, it keeps moving until it’s no longer visible.

Cyan :: Tracker Ball Trackers hound Happy Ball until they’re shot or he’s caught by them; these need to be shot as soon as possible.

Purple :: Reversing Tracker Ball As with Reverse-A-Ball, this nasty is fired and then decelerates to a stop, at which point it realigns itself to aim at Happy Ball and begins to accelerate again!

Green :: ReBouncer Ball Moves just like the Speeder Ball, except that it’ll rebound off the edges of the happy place rather than falling out. As with Trackers, these need to be given a priority kicking and they can seriously clutter the Happy Place.

CREDIT WHERE IT’S DUE

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Why Happy Balls? They started life as a series of test graphics when the game engine was being constructed and it sort of evolved through a couple of re-drawings of the basic graphics to the current state. The basic design is "inspired" in part by Bob Fearon’s War Tw*t (as in the idea of the spawning nasty and smaller attackers was nicked), although the mechanic has been altered somewhat by the addition of four way, fixed directional firing and the ability to destroy the rather literal "mothership".

What tools were used to make Happy Ball Is Happy? The game was written as a teach-yourself C++ endeavour; the code was edited with CodeBlocks and compiled with MinGW. For graphics and the MIDI soundtrack, a slightly out-of-date edition of Allegro was used. An old version of Photoshop was gainfully employed to produce most of the graphics and the more observant viewers will probably recognise the "classic" lens flare on the background.

Music by Sean Bee and Reyn Ouwehand…? The music used within Happy Ball Is Happy is a MIDI cover by Sean Bee taken from VGMusic.com but the original tune is from the Commodore 64 game Flimbo’s Quest and was composed by Reyn Ouwehand.

IMPORTANT FINAL NOTES
This is a first attempt at writing anything in C++ and as such is distributed without any warranties, implied or otherwise. There has been some testing of the game on a range of computers with different video cards and installations of Windows without issue (apart from Vista Home, which seems to not like it for some unspecified reason) but there’s no guarantees that it’ll run on everything and the odds are I’ve done something particularly ridiculous which means it’ll crash and burn for no reason. If it does something squiffy, please let me know through the Illogistix website.