Tales of Sticks and Balls: The Chain Reaction

Tales of Sticks and Balls A Very Rushed and questionably held-together excuse for a game where you guide balls into goals and desperately keep a poor excuse for a Rube Goldberg machine alive.

This is my entry for the QUT GDC 2025 Winter Jam (https://itch.io/jam/gdc-2025-winter-jam), which was made in a mad weekend sprint and loosely inspired by the theme Chain Reaction.

 Controls:

• Play using your mouse.
• Left Click: Remove grey blocks/obstacles.
• R: Restart level.
• ESC: Pause.
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Theme Interpretation (Chain Reaction):

As kids, my little brother and I built wildly impractical Rube Goldberg machines. But being the little rat he is, he’d go around and sabotage them by taping, gluing, and blu-tacking every loose piece until nothing moved at all. This game is a tribute to that chain reaction of chaos and sabotage except now you’re the one trying to keep it all moving.

 

Dev Time: 

 Around 4–6 hours. I originally only had the weekend free and then got called in to work on Sunday. I fully expected for this game to never make it past the early prototyping stage with the time that I had but thanks to a glorious extension on the submission time I was just able to throw something that could be loosely called a game together.

 

FAQs 

  1) Why is it called Tales of Sticks and Balls? Is that a D**k joke? 
 Yes. I was sleep deprived after finishing work, completely out of ideas, and asked my friend for a name. This is what he gave me. Sorry.

2) Why does the game look like this?
Because it was made very quickly and my art skills peaked at stick figures.

3) Is it winnable?
Technically, yes.

4) Why doesn’t the machine always work?
Because real Rube Goldberg machines never do and this is an authentic simulation of that frustration, and this is definitely not an excuse for my poor Lvl design skills.

5) Will you update it?
I would like to because I really like the original idea that I had for the game, but I mostly will never have time to sit back down and remake it. I might polish it up tho. Or I’ll make it worse. 

6) Why should I play this?
Because you have five spare minutes, low standards, and a soft spot for balls, sticks, and a bad joke that only exists in the title.

 

While You’re Here:
 This game was made for fun, to learn some stuff and mostly to blow off some steam after work, and oh boy did it not turn out well. After wasting your time with Tales of Sticks and Balls please take a moment to check out the other amazing games in the jam. I’m sure that everyone poured a lot more time, energy, and creativity into their projects than I did so please go play them!

Fonts Used: Kenney Mini by Kenney (CC0)