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Sliceball 4.2: balls that break like what they're made of
4.2 is out on both stores. It's the update where the balls stopped being palette swaps of each other. Here's what changed and why.
Three new balls
Atom, Buckyball, and Split Metal are in the shop at 500, 750, and 1,000 cash. The models had been sitting in the project, never wired up. The shop grid scrolls now, since nine balls don't fit on one screen.
The eyeball looks at you
The old eyeball skin had an iris painted onto the texture, so it rolled with the ball and you'd sometimes see two of them. Now it's a real eye that always faces the camera, and every so often it winks. I know it's a small thing. It's my favorite thing in the update.
Every ball breaks like its material
When you fail a level the ball comes apart. In 4.1 every skin came apart into the same white wireframe pieces. Now each one breaks into fragments of its own color and material, with its own sound: wood splinters, metal shatters, the bomb goes off. The sounds are CC0. There was also a bug where a retry always used the first skin's pieces no matter which ball you had equipped, which is fixed.
A short intro
The game opens on a studio ident now, a few seconds of the MayBolt wordmark and a lightning strike, then the menu. You can tap through it from the moment the bolt lands, and if you have Reduce Motion on, the strike is just a glow. If it gets old, tell me.
Fixes
Tapping Pause could register as a slice and cost you the run. Touches over the interface don't cut anymore. Retrying a level on your first attempt could leave the ball frozen. The privacy policy link in the game went to a dead page. All three are fixed. The camera follow was tied to the frame rate; on 120 Hz screens it's smoother now. Ads that failed to load used to stay failed for the session; now they retry on their own. And the game no longer signs into Game Center when it launches, only if you open the leaderboard.
Analytics, and a consent switch
4.2 adds Google Analytics for Firebase so I can see how many people play and how long they stay. It only sends the basics, and it follows the same choice you made for ads: where the law requires a consent form, declining covers analytics too, and there's a Manage Ad Consent row in Options if you change your mind. The privacy policy spells out exactly what's collected.
If 4.2 broke something for you, the support page says how to reach me, and I read every message. If it didn't, a rating on the store helps more than anything else I can ask for.