Our Story and how we met Jelle

During the lockdown of 2020,  at a time when we were starved of sports or any kind of exciting live action, we stumbled across the fantastic Jelle’s Marble Runs!

 https://www.youtube.com/c/JellesMarbleRuns 

Being game developers we thought there must be a Jelle’s Marble game we can play. We searched…there wasn’t… and that was the lightbulb moment.

We contacted Jelle and his team. We told them of our love for his marble runs and how we could recreate them in a video game. Jelle agreed, and we were rolling!

Our voyage began. We spent our evenings watching videos, making notes, zooming with Jelle and building a game design document for the first game – Jelle’s Marble League.

In 2021 we started work on it. We made a demo, showed it to Jelle and his team and they loved it!  We carried on until we had something that started to show the potential for the full game. Some call it a demo, we call it our baby.

That led us to today, asking you guys to help us finish this game.  We’ve gotten half way there and now we need to motor on and finish it.  That’s where you guys come in. To help us fund this beautiful thing, to help us make this the world’s new obsession and in return we’ll give you some lovely things.

The Game

We’re working in the Unity game engine. We’ve made many games in it, so it feels like a second skin. Our developers are craftsmen of the digital age, magicians, people with a passion, an obsession.

We decided to make Marble League first. It’s where this obsession started and we figure is the best place to start. It’s going to feature all the things we (and you) love about Marble League, in no particular order –

• Greg Woods custom made commentary
• All the official teams as well as custom teams.
• Marble and team designer to allow you to build your own teams.
• All of the official events from 2021 Marble League.
• Single player career mode – manage your team to become season champions.
• Multiplayer local couch mode – take on buddies in your own space.
• Multiplayer Online – take on the world.
• Stats and characteristics that change over time.
• and better still have your say on the discord channel – we’re listening.

https://discord.com/channels/392456404608483343/392458771596574740

Big Head Games & Jelle’s Marbles

Big Head Games have been making games for donkey’s years, starting out individually in game studios working on titles as diverse as Pokemon, Hannah Montana, Tony Hawks, Batman, Sky Sports Football Manager, Lemmings, Colin McRae Rally and many more.

Forming Big Head Games at the start of the iPhone era and making games for other people including Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 for EA, Grease (yes the movie) for 505 Games as well as our own games with the massively successful snooker sim International Snooker and Pool classic Doodle Pool.

Most people reading this will already know about Jelle but for those who don’t, Jelle’s been making YouTube videos of marble machines and marble runs since he could hold a camera, his YouTube channel is now huge with 1.34m subscribers and has been featured in media around the world including on Sky and HBO’s John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight show as well as ESPN and numerous pieces on news channels.

Known as the Marble Master his creations have made an impact in every corner of the world.  https://www.youtube.com/c/JellesMarbleRuns 

The development process

We are currently at what is known as first playable. That is a version of the game you can play that represents how the game will look and play, calling out key parts. Rough and ready it forms the basis of the game as a whole. Next up we work towards second playable in August and Alpha in September – it’s this build that will be uploaded to Steam and early backers will get access to, it’ll not be perfect, it’ll still be in development and it’ll give you a chance to comment and feedback your thoughts to the developers. Together we take this game to Beta, a complete game just needing translations and bug fixes. This is timed for October.

Once we have a clean build we’ll start on more content, currently we think we’ll be adding winter events next.

Risks and challenges

We feel there are very few risks, as we are already a long way on with development and have developed many games previously. So we feel the game will be completed and on time. We’ve kept the perk rewards simple so we know we can fulfil them.