Giant Horse Deathball by fakefirefly
The farm animal uprising is here! Un-stable your animal friends from their stables and join the unstable horse deathball.
Features
- An adrenaline rush of arcade action
- Battle your way through 4 completely destructible levels
- Collect over 12 unique animals which may or may not actually live in stables
- Look at dialogue straight from the UN's-Table
- Go for a high score since the entire game is a time-attack mode
- Listen to me serenade you if you beat the game
My high score is 1328.80!
Controls
- Left click: move and add animals to your deathball
- Right click: pan the camera
- Middle click: recenter the camera
- Scroll wheel: zoom the camera
- Spacebar: accept ui prompt
Known bugs
- Sometimes the music doesn't fade out correctly, so 2 tracks will be playing at once
- Some enemies will get stuck in corners, especially on the last level where they will also blend in with the background
Play the web build on itch.io!



Tools used
- Godot 3.3.4
- Pyxel Edit
- FL Studio
- rFXGen
- Notepad++
- Visual Studio Code
- Git
- Brain
I streamed the entire development of Giant Horse Deathball live on Twitch. I work on games and open source software 4 times a week!
Ratings
| Overall | 221th | 3.588⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 129th | 3.721⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 115th | 3.794⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 273th | 3.574⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 363th | 3.221⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 255th | 3.182⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 31th | 4.015⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 190th | 3.424⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 30🗳️ | 46🗨️ |
What I do know is I had a pretty damn big grin on my face as 40 odd animals were careening across the screen into anything in their path.
A pretty damn fun game
The audio is *so good*! The physics are definitely hard to get used to at first, but eventually I figured out it was useful for hitting multiple buildings (or fences) at once.
I also felt like the controls were a bit weird, which is why the first level has really awkward tutorial messages.
@nick-rafalski Thanks for playing the game! Fun fact, the pile of poo actually does zero damage, so in theory it's possible to softlock the game if you lose your starting animals.
@parafactual Thanks for the feedback! By 'the horse is too fragile', do you mean that it's too hard to control? Or that the horse gets knocked around by enemies too easily? When the deathball grows to 20+ animals, getting knocked around by 1 enemy is inconsequential.
@ghoulean Thanks for playing and the feedback! Scrolling and zooming is indeed a problem. I wanted to do screen dragging like Starcraft or League of Legends, but HTML5 games can have trouble capturing your mouse. Thus, I had to come up with a different camera control scheme.
@c64cosmin Thanks for playing! There should be 5 enemies on the last level; I did notice that enemies tend to get stuck in corners due to how their AI works. The problem with the last level is that the enemies and background are both red, so getting stuck in the corner is even worse on that level.
@mickm Thanks for sharing your experience! I think the structure of the tutorial level should have been flipped around to prevent players from getting bored killing the farmer (so deathball first, then killing). It seems like a lot of players get bored trying to kill the farmer.
Each animal just accelerates towards your left click with no distance checking, so they all have their own momentum. Picking up animals is just left clicking as well.
@peace-of-cake-games Thanks for playing! Controlling the ball is hard and almost tedious if you want complete control, so I found that it's just more fun to swing the ball around and see what happens!
@p-r Thanks for playing! The poop enemy was a late addition but probably has one of the best drawn sprites. It also does no damage.
Fun :smile:
:purple_heart: :dart: :frog:
@blackquiltro Thanks for playing! The camera controls definitely need work. I wanted to go for Starcraft/League of Legends style mouse control but it's hard to guarantee users will fullscreen the game (so mouse dragging will work).
@kalevrk Thanks for the feedback! I actually briefly tested an auto following camera but it was very unwieldly and felt like it might give me motion sickness. The current camera controls aren't much better though, so I'll need to think about it.
@jcmonkey Thanks for playing! It gets even more fun once you're controlling more than just the horse.
@denhette Thanks for playing! I think the max amount of animals you can gather in-game is 64, but I've never checked. Possibly more on level 2.
@paroxysmal Thanks for the feedback! Keyboard controls would have been a nice addition. I guess I just forgot to include them since I got so used to mouse controls.
@ludokultur Thanks for playing! Yeah, the tutorial level should have been flipped around so the player gathers the deathball, then shows the enemy.
@purpledartfrog Thanks for playing! It was a weird idea for sure, and gets even weirder once you have 20+ animals swirling around.
@jeremyfa Thanks for playing the game! I hope you also got to the point where you get to control more than just the horse, since that's where the game truly starts.
@mrnannings Thanks for playing! Yeah the music is a bit too loud and there's only 2 combat songs. I did try to break up the music by having a calmer level select track, which you hopefully got to by beating the tutorial.

@binaryprinciple Thanks for the feedback! That's a neat idea, maybe I'll try and incorporate it into the post-LD version.
The music loop drove me a bit nuts after like 20 seconds :P
Other than that, really funny idea and it felt VERY satisfying to rush through the levels once you hit a kind of "critical mass" of animals. Good job!