The Need To Be Uncomfortably Flexible

At first, New Ballbylon was supposed to be gorgeous. A fresh start. A defiance against whatever great force – gravity, god, or goddamned luck – sent a meteor to create a seemingly bottomless pit of nightmares to bounce balls against. And, most importantly, a place for me to make pretty, since that is my ultimate goal in any game with a base-building element. What my New Ballbylon has more often been is a mess. Its appearance would make any passerbys believe it’s a miracle anything stands, and that all its citizens are there by force, systemic issues, or some cruel chain of bad life decisions.

There are two reasons that my New Ballbylon constantly looks like it just got off the ground. First, it actually is in a perpetual state of getting off the ground due to the staggered pace of earning blueprints. The possibilities for what my base can be are behind many breakable walls of skeletons, snakes, and other monsters in the pit, which means that I’m frequently learning about new and useful structures that require significant rearrangements in my base to fit them.

Second, the method in which buildings are constructed is very unwieldy. From Cult of the Lamb to Frostpunk to Synergy, most games with a major base building element make construction a simple matter of having enough resources. Want a new house? You need more wood. Want a new courtyard? Go gather more stones. The method of collection will be different from game to game, but resources are usually the chief obstacle to a shiny new building to look at and leverage. Unless you’re playing Ball x Pit, where in addition to needing enough gold, stone, and/or wood to build new structures, I must also angle and bounce my characters multiple times against a new structure to finish it. It is a cumbersome method of progression that is, admittedly, pleasing to watch, but often necessitates even more rearranging than I already did if structures are to be finished in a reasonable amount of time.

In simpler words, building New Ballbylon has been a pain in the ass. I don’t like the way it looks. I dread rearranging it even though it’s relatively easy to do so. As is, it’s not what I want. But, despite all my complaints about the process, I’m very proud of New Ballbylon. The subtle but incredible thing about this patchwork city is that it’s not about what I want – it’s about the needs of the community forming there.

Community building is an increasingly hot topic right now as more and more regular people realize that their government, when it’s not actively trying to starve them or kidnap their neighbors, has no real plan to help them during an incredibly tumultuous time. While not a new revelation, many are waking up to the idea of their neighbors being their best allies. However, this also means many are learning that it’s not enough to live next to someone for them to help you – you have to invest in relationships. You have to turn those neighbors into a real community that talks to each other outside of pleasantries, that can voice their varied needs. Building communities is incredibly complex and hard, as I’m sure the many people and groups who have dedicated their entire beings to understanding it will tell you, and a major part of that complexity is the necessary mindset.

To put it plainly, you must be uncomfortably flexible for any hope of a community meant to stand the tests of Time and Change. No matter the expected makeup of a community, a diversity and conflict of opinions is inevitable. It’s easy (or should be) to agree that people shouldn’t go around killing each other willy-nilly, but it’s hard to decide where resources are allocated when multiple causes are worthwhile and urgent. The unique ways in which each person moves through and survives in the world makes it impossible to agree with anyone forever. This isn’t even accounting for how the ground underneath these communities will naturally shift over the years. Overall, today’s foundations may not be equipped to handle tomorrow’s contradictions, making rigidity no longer just a charitable way to describe stubborn institutions – it becomes the coffin wood for those who refuse to meet the moment.

No one needs look further than the U.S.’s two major political parties to see that crisis in action today, as both cling desperately to real and imagined versions of the past that keep them consistently out of step with significant parts of their bases and ill-prepared to help. If the NYC election of Zohran Mamdani is any indication, there is a real hunger for something different among the populace that current political leaders – out of fear, self-preservation, or whatever else causes a Republican president to endorse a Democratic nominee who swears he’ll put up a good fight against said president – don’t want to see manifest.

While I have deeply unkind words for this mindset and much of its horrifying impact, I will give it grace on one thing: It’s hard to build, and even harder to change what’s been built. Making blueprints is tough. Breaking ground and habits is uncomfortable. Updating rules is cumbersome. Staying dedicated is exhausting. Building and changing as an individual can take a lifetime. Building and changing a community is almost guaranteed to take longer. Truthfully, if New Ballbylon weren’t a digital space confined to my Nintendo Switch screen, I would realistically be dead before it even got to where it’s at right now. I would be working day in and day out hoping that the shaky nest of small houses and young wheat fields it started as will one day become a city that can survive Hell.

But I’m not dead, and have found myself more responsible for a city than any individual usually should be, so for the sake of New Ballbylon and its residents, I must do the uncomfortable and be flexible. If I want this cast of hunters, jokers, and extraterrestrials to have an easier time facing the monsters of tomorrow, I need to suck it up and move my cul-de-sac to make room for a market and a bank. If I hope to make tomorrow easier, or at all feasible, I need to let things look a little rough today.

New Ballbylon is not what I want it to be. But, without a doubt, it is always trying to be the city I need it to be. I’d even go as far as to say it has the potential to be better than what I initially imagined. Because whatever it becomes will have been made from being malleable for the community growing inside of it.

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Wallace Truesdale is a journalist and critic who loves games and soft cookies. He’s written for Endless Mode, Stop Caring, Gamers with Glasses, and more. You can usually find him writing at his site Exalclaw, or hanging out on Bluesky and Twitch.