I wasn’t able to get a great deal done over the past day, but I was able to begin playing with the look and feel for how MazeBall might look. To start with I had sourced a few images from iStockPhoto and ban dropping a couple of textures into the tiles that I had made.
Here you can see that I’ve dropped in a repeating pattern for the floor and one of the wall tiles (just above to the right of the ball) has a texture applied to it. This confirmed that I might be able to get something looking good out of this …

So after having a quick play with Photoshop I decided to change the whole set of tiles, but this time I made the floor a light texture. This REALLY didn’t work as the lighter texture for the floor made it look like you were up on top of walls and could fall off. This needed to change …

Here I made the floor darker, and changed the metal ball into a wooden one. It’s starting to look better now, but it’s a little too dark. Not sure if I will stay with the ball being wooden either as the metal makes a nicer contrast in these textures, but for the moment it can stay like this. I began playing with the floor tiles a little more, experimenting with how they might change as you rolled over them ‘toggling’ their state …

Here I had started making the floor tiles into actual bricks which feel like it makes more sense and I’m starting to get the coloring right. I’m happier with the wall now, though I will revisit them. For me it was obvious here that the floor tiles need some variation as they are all the same making it look artificial and too uniform. I’ve also changed the toggle state of the floor tiles to show a hieroglyphic symbol – this ties into the theme much better so I think I’m onto something here.

I added more floor tile types here, but you can see there’s a few graphical glitches going on where somehow tiles are missing – I’ve mostly fixed this but occasionally the odd tile still does this … not quite sure why yet …

And here’s with more variation in the floor tiles and different symbols for their toggle state. I feel this is really getting close to what I wanted to achieve now and can almost commit to it. I’m using the same texture for the top of all the walls here though, so I will have to also change that, but I like it otherwise. Its looking very brown but I think changing the ball to something metallic will help …

Just got to stress that I am using positional art from iStockPhoto in the above, I use the low-res images from the site before deciding what to buy. As you can see the design can change quite a lot during the process so I try to contain myself and not buy artwork before I have settled on a look.