The Night Balloonists

When evening falls the Night Balloonists compete for pollen in the darkened sky, riding the wind and splattering each other with ink from above or bashing pollen loose from below. When the sun rises only the airship with the most pollen will be victorious!  

The Night Balloonists was originally created as a entry to the GAMMA 4 One Button Games competition. Like all games created for GAMMMA 4 it uses only a single button per player. No arrow keys, mouse, joystick or d-pad. GAMMA games are meant to be played in a large social setting with people playing short bursts while others spectate. The Night Balloonists is optimized for these settings and has included a continuous side display that teaches spectators the basic gameplay. However we've found it also plays great if you have a few friends over and want a good quick party game to play together. The one button interface makes it a great game to play with non gamers who are intimidated by complex controls.

Created in 2010, uploaded to itch.io in 2024 to celebrate 15 years of Spooky Squid Games! 

WHAT PEOPLE HAVE SAID ABOUT THE NIGHT BALLOONISTS

“...a deliciously atmospheric competitive game ... There’s a surprising amount of drama and strategy given the simplicity of the one button control scheme.” — Paul Sottosanti, Senior Systems Designer, Darkspore

INSTRUCTIONS

Controls
On an XInput controller the button is A

On mouse and keyboard:
Player1 - Space or Left Mouse Button
Player2 - Enter or Right Mouse Button
Player3 - Alt
Player4 - Ctrl

How to Play

• Press and hold button to lower your balloon.
• Double tap button to boost upward, if you are carrying ink you will also shoot it downwards.
• Hitting opponents with your balloon at high speed (such as when boosting) will knock off a small amount of their pollen.
  
• Ink drops will momentarily stun a balloon and knock off more than half its pollen collection.
• Ink can be replenished by taking a dip in the ocean at the bottom of the screen. Players can hold up to five drops at a time.

The player with the most pollen at nights end, when the moon in the background has finished crossing the sky, wins the match. 

Play-tip: if you spot someone camping the top left corner remember you can bash them from below with a quick double tap! 

CREDITS

Miguel Sternberg - Art, Sound & Game Design
Andrij Pilkiw - Programming

Created using Game Maker 7.0 Pro

In addition the following 3rd party dlls were used:
GMXInput.dll by Yellowsix
supersound.dll by tsg1zzn

Sound effects include audio from freesounds.org and are
used under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 License.
These sounds were created by the following users:

AGFX - andriala - Benboncan - delphidebrain
Dynamicell - fabe - junggle - pengo_au - petenice
Pogotron - Rock Savage - sagetyrtlee

All music is from Apple Garage Band’s default loops.
 

TROUBLESHOOTING/KNOWN ISSUES
 
Because this game was created over a decade ago in an older version of GameMaker you may experience some minor quirks running it on modern systems, particularly in Windows 11. Here are some known issues, with suggested workarounds: 

The game doesn't quit when I hit Esc. 
Make sure the game has focus (Alt-Tab). If ESC still doesn't work after that try Alt+F4 to force quit. 

My gamepads don't work.
This game only supports XInput game controllers. If you are using a DirectInput controller you'll need to use joy2key to bind the keyboard/mouse buttons to the controller.

It looks weird, I see rough edges / shimmering pixels. 
The game auto scales to fill your screen while preserving aspect ratio. This can result in some janky rough looking pixels in modern versions of Windows due to how they handle scaling lower resolutions. It won't look quite as nice but it's still playable! 

I'm getting an "XINPUT1_3.dll not found" error.
You may need to update your version of DirectX. This error will only occur on older versions of windows.