Jazz Ball

Jezzball was a 1992 puzzle game shipped with the Microsoft Entertainment Pack. You play on an empty rectangle, with a few bouncing balls inside. You build walls that extend horizontally or vertically across the play area. The walls take a second or two to grow from your click point to the edges of the play area, and during that growth, if a ball hits the building wall, you lose a life. Once the wall is complete, it divides the play area into two regions, and any region without a ball gets "cleared." Clear 75% of the play area to win the level.

It is genuinely one of the cleverest pure-puzzle game designs of the 1990s. The mechanic is dead simple, but the strategy is rich. You want to make small, fast walls — but small walls don't clear much area. You want to trap balls in tiny corners — but balls move fast and unpredictably bounce. You learn to read the trajectories of multiple balls at once and find the moment when none of them are anywhere near where you want to build.

Our remake is Jezzball with a cyberpunk paint job. The mechanic is unchanged because the mechanic doesn't need changing. Two things did need attention: the wall-building tension and the difficulty curve.

The wall-building tension is the hidden engine of the game. When you click and a wall starts growing, your heart rate goes up because the wall is now vulnerable. The original game had a subtle audio tick on each frame the wall was building. I didn't realise how much that single sound carried the experience until I built a version without it, and the game felt completely flat. I had to add the tick back in. There's a lesson in there.

The difficulty curve in the original got too cruel too fast — once you had four or five balls bouncing simultaneously, building any wall longer than half a screen was almost suicidal. We softened the curve so that early levels add balls more gradually and the target percentage scales more forgivingly. Hard mode still ramps up to the original Microsoft cruelty.

How to play well. Always look at every ball before you click. Plan your wall around the ball trajectories, not your own ambitions. Build short walls in the early game to clear space, then use long walls to corner the remaining balls into the smallest possible region. Pressing space rotates your wall between horizontal and vertical — use this constantly; the right orientation is rarely the obvious one.