Ha, surprisingly the ball wasn't too hard, it was just drawing lines in 3D space, rotating by a little bit for each one, then just a bunch of circles for the "latitudes". Then it was a simple animation to get it rolling, and some interaction to react to the mouse. For the signals, it's the same thing but drawing squares and crosses, with a bigger radiuses to compensate for the sphere size!
The bulk of the work went into the script and getting the interactions just right, which I don't think I nailed perfectly based on playtesting and some comments, but I think we struck a pretty good balance between it being too obvious and being hard. I would definitely like to take another crack at it, though!