Ball x Pit creator reveals how the game was almost something completely different

Ball x Pit didn’t always have the same charm as we see today in one of the biggest breakout indie hits of 2025. It wasn’t until one huge pivot that the game actually came together.

Ball x Pit is simple enough on the surface. You pick a character, load into a level, and fight three bosses. Easy, right? Well, that’s barely enough to get a ball rolling downhill.

Upgrades, Evolutions, character combos, a full-fledged city builder, and near-endless replayability are what make the ball-bouncing roguelike shine. However, as creator Kenny Sun told us, it wasn’t always envisioned this way. In fact, Ball x Pit was once a very different game with a much slower pace.

It wasn’t until one particular change completely overhauled the game’s pacing that it started gaining momentum.

Ball x Pit was originally a game just for The Tactician

Among Ball x Pit’s roster of 16 characters, The Tactician serves as one of the least popular. Rather than having manual control over every snap decision and reactive movement, this character transforms the game into a turn-based experience.

Runs effectively grind to a halt, going from 7-10 minute blitzes to 20+ minute slogs. While there is fun to be had in carefully planning every move, it goes against the chaotic nature of every other system in play.

As it turns out, that’s just what Ball x Pit used to be, in its entirety. In the early stages of development, the now lightning-quick roguelike was a slow-paced, turn-based grind.

“The Tactician character… That was the way it was played,” Sun said. “Then, a couple of months into development, I made a change to make it real-time.

“The moment I played it in real-time, I knew I’d made the right choice.”

As for the pacing – one of Ball x Pit’s biggest strengths, as you can pick it up and put it down in a matter of minutes – well, that came thanks to the complaint of a single playtester.

Back when The Tactician was in charge, and the entire game was turn-based, “runs were 30 minutes long, just like Vampire Survivors,” Sun explained.

“There was one playtester who said ‘This feels way too long!’ So from there, I just halved it, but even that still felt too long, so I added a way to change the speed.”

What’s next for Ball x Pit?

With work on Ball x Pit’s 1.0 build completed “a bit sooner” than originally scheduled, it left Sun and his co-developers extra time to work on some additional bits of content. This content is what fans will be seeing trickled out next year as part of three free updates.

This extra content “wasn’t enough to make anything super substantial,” Sun said, “so it didn’t make sense for a paid expansion.”

As for what’s included, we know to expect just about everything, ranging from new characters and buildings to all-new stages. Cheekily, Sun outlined how “all of the post-launch stuff is in the code,” so it may not be a big secret for everyone in the community.

Regarding new characters, Sun assured they will be nothing like the less popular Tactician, or The Radical, who outright plays the game for you. “I don’t think I want to lean into that,” Sun said. “They’re more in the camp of just different ideas and ways to play.

While there’ll be plenty of new content to expand upon the current formula, Sun also appears open to the idea of new modes as well. When we pitched him on an endless mode, he replied, saying “it would be interesting to explore in the future.”