“Recently The Coin was melted on bubble ball dot com and a black hole engulfed the universe.”
That’s what The Game Band designer Stephen Bell said when I asked him Creative Director Sam Rosenthal and Game Design Lead Joel Clark to remind me what the recent events in the world of bubbleball were. Bell eagerly agreed to make that statement, saying he was “practicing.”
Of course, “Moments ago” in the world of bubbleball was almost exactly a year ago when the “Expansion Era” came to an explosive end. However, the rest of the context doesn’t matter. A black hole has swallowed everything Bubble Ball was, and now The Game Band is ready to bring Bubble Ball back for its audience to decide what it is will be.
extension, contract
As Rosenthal described it at the time I interviewed him last year, Bubble Ball is an “absurdistic horror version of fantasy baseball”. It is a group of fictional baseball teams, named Canada Moist Talkers, Kansas City Breath Mints, and Charleston Shoe Thieves, who play fictional simulator-run baseball games over the course of a week.
Its audience “plays” Bubble Ball by placing bets (in fictional currency, no real money involved) on the outcome of these games. Your winnings are exchanged for votes in a weekly poll, where the community decides new rules for future games. Then the week starts all over again, with more and more ridiculous games being played. Previous rule changes have introduced elements like player-scorching umpires, fourth bases, and even a giant god-like peanut. For those who could follow the increasingly ludicrous storylines, it was a blast. But by the end of the expansion era in 2021, Bubbleball had become so story-heavy and complex that many former fans had stepped away and new fans were slow to join.
But The Game Band wants to change that, hence the year-long hiatus (or “grand siesta” in game parlance).
“More than anything, we’ve used it as a space to step back and figure out what we want for the long haul,” says Rosenthal. “If we just continued at our current pace, we’d have a good sense of where we were going… We’ve had a harder time getting new people into the herd, [hearing] always the same refrain: ‘I feel like I’ve missed the connection, there’s so much going on here all the time, it’s so hard to keep track.’”
To Our Grace
It was perhaps inevitable that The Game Band would find themselves in this situation. After all, Bubble Ball was never meant to become the overnight cult hit that it quickly became when it launched in 2020. It was originally conceived as a silly side project while The Game Band figured out what their next full game would be after the release of Where Cards in the fall. But it started unexpectedly, forcing The Game Band to change their studio strategy to keep them going. It was a lot of sudden and unexpected work for a team of about six developers.
The Game Band development team has since grown to 27 members and is now launching Fall Ball: a prologue to the next era of bubble ball. Over the next few weeks, various players from the Bubble Ball past will fall out of the aforementioned black hole (Get it? FALL Ball?) and randomly end up on different teams. Meanwhile, audiences can opt-in via email to receive “commemorative rewards” that will be unlocked by the entire fan base when they reach certain milestone numbers of opt-ins. There will be no games during this time, but these will come at an unannounced date after Fall Ball.
Previously Bubble Ball was a fully browser-based experience, but no more. In addition to Fall Ball, The Game Band is introducing an app for iOS and Android that will launch alongside the new era. The app will be fully on par with features on the website as well as push notifications, giving Bubble Ball the flavor of a more traditional sports app like ESPN.
This ties in well with some of the changes audiences should expect as Bubble Ball returns to its new era. It’s still the same structure – a week of games, a championship, voting on Sunday – but Rosenthal says they aim to make it friendlier for people who can’t stare at the site all day to watch games see. He won’t share any specific details just yet but says it will be easier to bet on matches in advance. Social community features are also coming, making it easier for teams to collaborate on voting strategies without individuals having to log into a specific Discord server or Twitter.
Amid all of this, Bubble Ball remains free-to-play. But while it has been largely funded through weekly sponsorships from various companies, the coming era will see the introduction of optional paid transactions. The team assures that nothing involving real money will affect the game of Bubble Ball itself – it’s all tied to elements that allow individuals to customize their user experience, especially when coupled with Bubble Ball’s social elements.
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The most critical thing is that Blaseball remains at the mercy of its fans. The year-long siesta has allowed The Game Band to play out what Clark calls the “possibility space” much earlier than before. The team is moving away from the big, overarching storylines that characterized the first two eras in favor of a more “monster of the week” format that allows fans to jump in and out without having to read pages of wiki articles about it what happened months ago. But the stories told week after week remain in the hands of the Sim and the fans.
“We had a lot more time to plan, so we did a lot more thinking ahead,” says Clark. “But part of that is leaving room for improvisation, since the nature of the simulation is essentially an evolving storytelling machine. We have to improvise, right? There will be things the sim does that we can’t wait for, there will be stories that fans will tell around the sim that we can’t wait to tell. And there will be things they find they can do that we can’t wait for. So we design the possibility space and try to give ourselves the tools to be able to improvise and have that ready ahead of time, so we’re not building things on the fly, we’ve got things to bring in that are necessary.”
An era of sustainability
With that comes the hope (if not the promise) that bubbleball is done with year-long siestas like this last one. It’s about sustainability, the team tells me – something they discussed in the past. Clark admits that The Game Band has learned a lot over time about what sustainability means. Rosenthal, on the other hand, is optimistic about Blaseball’s prospects now that it has a much larger team to back it up and a “much more stable foundation.”
The trio add that their internal processes likely need some refinement. After all, many of The Game Band’s 27 members have been hired over the last year and have never been on the team as games play, fans vote on decisions and bubbles bob beneath everyone’s feet. It’s daunting, but also an exciting creative challenge for the team.
This quest for sustainability extends not only to the team, but also to the community that works with them to make Blaseball history.
“I think that’s all we keep coming back to because we’ve heard that and we’ve felt it across two eras where people were like, ‘That was interesting to me, but I got off of it or I can can’t find your way around,’” Bell says. “So [success would mean] Keeping Bubbleball’s energy, still doing the crazy chaos stuff we love to do, but not closing the door on new fans.”
The Bubble Ball’s Fall Ball website update is now available, with the first player expected to fall out of a black hole on October 28th, and the Bubble Ball app is set to be released at the same unannounced upcoming time as the next era.
Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.
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