Factory Balls Forever

🏭 Factory Balls Forever: Boolean Logic and Layer Masking

Factory Balls Forever is a puzzle game that gamifies the industrial process of manufacturing and masking. The player is presented with a plain white ball and a target design. Using a set of tools (paint buckets, hats, belts, seeds), the player must replicate the target. The core challenge is the Order of Operations. Placing a hat masks the top of the ball. Painting it red afterwards only paints the bottom. This is essentially a physical representation of Photoshop layers or boolean subtraction.

This title is a 2026 benchmark for reverse engineering skills. The player must deconstruct the final product into its constituent steps and execute them in reverse chronological order to find the starting move.

🧠 Cognitive & Algorithmic Skills

The game builds a programmer's mindset:

• Deconstruction: Looking at a complex ball with stripes, dots, and a hat, the player must identify: "The stripes are underneath the dots. Therefore, I must stripe first, mask, then dot."
• Negative Space Visualization: Tools like belts or sunglasses cover parts of the ball. The player must think about what won't be painted. This utilization of negative space is a key artistic and logical skill.
• Recursive Thinking: "To get a green ball with a yellow stripe, I need to paint it yellow, cover the stripe area, paint it green, then remove the cover." This multi-step planning is recursive.

🎮 Mechanics & Tools

The puzzle logic relies on strict masking rules:

• Paint: Applies color to all exposed surfaces. It overwrites previous colors unless masked.
• Masks (Hats/Belts): Physical objects that block paint. They obey gravity (usually top-down). Some masks are "transparent" to logic but opaque to paint.
• Organic Tools: Seeds might grow grass; heaters might crack the shell. These introduce state changes beyond simple color, adding texture variables to the puzzle.

🏆 Production Line Strategy

1. Work from the Inside Out

Identify the "deepest" layer (usually the background color). Apply that first. Then identify the next layer up. Build the ball from the core to the surface.

2. Test Your Masks

If you don't know what a tool does, apply it and paint. Observe the negative space it creates. Trial and error is a valid scientific method here. There is no penalty for binning a failed ball.

🛡️ Technical Info

Clean vector design:

• Visuals: Minimalist aesthetic ensures that colors and shapes are unambiguous.
• Generation: "Forever" implies procedural generation or a massive library of levels, ensuring endless replayability.

❓ FAQ