Rose: For someone who has never heard of your game, how would you describe it without using the usual genre labels?
Imagine playing billiards, except the balls are magical, the rules keep changing, and a single shot can trigger a chain reaction that goes completely out of control.
You start with a white marble and a couple of colored ones. Every time you touch a colored marble, you score points. Every time a marble hits a cushion, your multiplier increases. Simple enough, right?
But then you start collecting strange objects that change how everything interacts. Some marbles explode, others trigger their neighbors, some multiply your score, and suddenly your carefully aimed billiards shot has turned into glorious chaos.
The fun part is that you built that chaos yourself.
Rose: Where did the idea for this game come from?
It actually started with Pierre Cattan, the founder of Small Bang Studio, who wanted to play French carom billiards on his phone during his daily commutes.
French billiards is quite different from pool. There are no pockets, and the whole game revolves around angles, rebounds, and collisions between balls. It's a beautifully simple system with a surprising amount of depth.
At some point, the idea of adding roguelike mechanics came into the picture. What if you could gradually change the rules of billiards as you played? What if every new object opened up another possible combination?
That's how the project gradually evolved into something quite different from its original mobile concept.
And somewhat ironically, we ended up making a PC game that we would still love to bring to mobile someday!
Rose: What makes your game different from other games in the same space?
I think it's the unusual combination of physical skill, strategic thinking, and a surprisingly relaxing atmosphere.
In the beginning, you're genuinely playing billiards. You have to think about angles, positioning, how much force to use, and which marble you want to hit first.
But as your run progresses, you gradually build a machine around those very simple actions. Your Talismans, Marble Bonuses, and Runes start interacting with each other, sometimes in ways we hadn't even anticipated ourselves.
Eventually, a single shot can trigger dozens or hundreds of interactions.
And yet, the game remains pretty chill. You can take your time, think about your next move, and enjoy the atmosphere. We put a lot of care into our original music and sound design, which give the game an almost ASMR-like quality, although considerably more active!
It's a strange balance between switching off and switching your brain on. You can relax, enjoy all those satisfying little sounds, and watch the marbles bounce around. But if you really want to go far, you'll need to connect a few neurons!
Rose: Was there anything you had to cut that you still secretly wish you could put back?
Oh, absolutely. An entire narrative universe, actually!
Carnaval Marbles was originally going to be much more story-driven.
We imagined an alternative version of Europe dominated by a powerful Church that persecuted anyone who didn't fit its vision of the world. Monsters, mythological creatures, scientists, and other outsiders had to find somewhere to hide.
The carnival was supposed to be their refuge. You could have Dracula and Galileo living side by side, which I still think is a pretty fun premise.
We even wrote the history of individual carnival attractions, their strange origins, and the characters associated with them. A lot of that material never made it into the final game.
Eventually, we realized the gameplay was strong enough to stand on its own, and we decided to focus on that.
But the worldbuilding wasn't wasted. It helped shape the characters, the illustrations, and the atmosphere of the carnival. It's not every day you come across a Simurgh in a video game, after all!
I'd still love to explore that world more deeply someday.
Rose: What is something players probably won't realize took an absurd amount of work?
Balance. Definitely balance.
We have 96 Talismans, 7 Marble Bonuses, 9 Runes, 4 Run Items, and 8 starting characters. The number of possible combinations is absolutely ridiculous.
And every interaction needs to be checked for several reasons. First, does it actually work? Is it any good? Is it too good? And perhaps most importantly, how do we make something interesting without simply making it stronger?
I've personally spent around 900 hours playing the game, on top of all the testing done by the rest of the team and our fantastic alpha players.
All of that helped us reach what I'd call a fragile state of balance. And every time we add new content, we have to start checking those interactions all over again!
Sound design was another massive challenge.
How do you make sounds satisfying without making them annoying? Recognizable without becoming repetitive? And how on earth do you blend thousands of sound effects happening almost simultaneously into something that still sounds good?
It's the kind of thing players might never consciously notice, which probably means we've done our job!
Rose: What is the weirdest bug you've encountered that you almost wanted to keep?
We actually hid a pretty ridiculous synergy in the game.
Among our 96 Talismans, there are only two that grant an additional shot. If you manage to collect both, play as Métis (a character who also gets an extra shot), and combine that with the bonus shot from the Disco Ball, you can reach 7 shots per round.
Why seven? Because there's another Talisman called Horseshoe that multiplies your Multi by 7 every 7 shots. It was supposed to be one of the best-hidden synergies in the game, rewarding players who managed to put all the pieces together.
Except... we had a tiny problem.
When you sold an Extra Shot Talisman, the game removed the Talisman but forgot to remove the extra shot from your character!
So if you had an unlimited supply of gold, you could just keep buying and selling the same Talisman, accumulating more and more shots.
We had carefully designed a secret way to reach 7 shots per round, and accidentally created a way to reach infinity.
Not quite the balance we were aiming for, but pretty funny nonetheless.
Rose: Is there a particular emotion you wanted players to walk away with from your game?
We want people to relax and go BRRRRR.
That's pretty much the whole philosophy!
We wanted to create something satisfying and relaxing, where you can take your time and enjoy the little things. A good shot, the sound of marbles colliding, the music, a clever combination coming together.
And then suddenly, everything goes completely nuts, numbers start flying everywhere, and you get that little rush of excitement from watching something you've built work better than you ever expected.
There's also the pleasure of figuring things out for yourself. That moment when you discover a combination and think, "Wait, what if I tried THIS?"
If players can alternate between being completely relaxed and ridiculously excited about a bunch of marbles bouncing around, we've done what we set out to do.
Rose: What's one piece of advice you wish you'd had before starting?
Get the game into the hands of people who have absolutely no idea how it's supposed to work, as early as possible.
When you spend months designing a system, everything starts feeling obvious to you. You know what every Talisman does, you understand the logic behind each color, and you know which combinations are supposed to be powerful.
Then someone plays your game for the first time and completely ignores the strategy you thought was essential.
Sometimes they struggle with something you considered incredibly simple. Sometimes they discover a synergy you've never noticed. Sometimes they win using the character you thought was the weakest.
It's fascinating, occasionally frustrating, and incredibly useful.
We learned a lot through playtesting, but watching people play after release has been another education entirely.
I'd also tell my past self that cutting an idea doesn't necessarily mean it was a bad idea. Sometimes it just belongs in a different game.
Rose: Five years from now, what do you hope people remember about this game?
Ideally? "Wait, Carnaval Marbles was their first game? Damn, these people are geniuses!"
More seriously, if people still remember Carnaval Marbles in five years, for whatever reason, I'll consider that a huge win.
Of course, I'd love it to be because they had a great time with it, because they remember a particularly ridiculous run, or because they occasionally get the urge to come back and try another build.
We were aiming for something somewhere between sugar and cocaine on the addiction scale. That's a joke, obviously. Please don't quote me out of context! But you get the idea. Something immediately satisfying that keeps making you think, "Okay, just one more run."
If people still feel that way five years from now, I'll be very happy.
Rose: Why should someone reading/watching this go play your game today?
Because I think people can recognize passion when they see it.
And I genuinely believe that for $6.99, the journey is worth it.(editors note: Rose also believes that the journey is worth it!)
Rose: Finally, the question we ask every developer: After everything you've told us, can you officially confirm that your game is, in fact, probably a game?
I've seen people singing the Disco Ball sound effect for three hours straight.