For those of y’all from the future, we definitely camped here. I spent around 15 seconds getting formatting right, though.
Hey! It’s 2022! Let’s make this year better than the last!
These past few days, I’ve been solo developing a remake of a gamemode found in a different game called ‘ball tag’. I had plans to do this a while back, but it seems like now is the perfect time to develop and release a game like this. It’s not as massive of a game compared to other projects, and it’s not a hardcore game, but it’s still fun for me to develop!
If you’re not familiar with the gamemode, here’s the gist: A player is randomly chosen and is given a ball. If they throw the ball, and that ball touches a different player, that player is now tagged and has to pick up the ball again and tag someone else quickly. Once the timer runs out, both the tagged player and the ball are eliminated, as well as everyone else who is unfortunate enough to be near them. The goal is to be the last player standing.
Got it? You’ve probably got the right idea in your head… BUT you didn’t exaggerate it enough. You’ll probably understand it better with a clip from the game.
I’m just being careful when saying the following videos might trigger epilepsy. Don’t worry, I’ll try to reduce this once the game releases.
I also want to show off the spectating system that I made a day ago (or a year ago, if you want to make that kind of a joke ). It took a few hours to get it working properly, but in the end it was well worth it.
(Physics are a little delayed when you’re running 4 different instances of a game at once. I’m good at the game, I promise.)
There’s some other features that I would like to show, but unfortunately can’t. These include:
- Great mobile support and mobile specific animations
- Easily extendable gameplay (each gamemode is a module, and I have control over certain events, such as joining the game late, getting tagged, etc,)
- Ability to take cover behind objects
- And the UI color transition whenever a new round begins and a new color is assigned to you
And some things I have yet to do include:
- Lobby UI
- Currency (maybe two different kinds? One of which you can only get by winning rounds, and the other from playing the game?)
- A shop, where you can buy cosmetics
- More gamemodes
- Map/gamemode voting
- Sounds
- And finally, more maps
The map and clothing are just placeholders. The shirt and pants are not created by me, and were just taken from the toolbox.
Finally, one last thing that I want to mention about this project is that I’m keeping the scope small. When I was a beginner, I used to have these massive projects in mind that never came to fruition. As time went on, the scope of my projects shrunk. These smaller projects were not only easier to complete, but were also higher in quality. Do something small and manageable, and you’ll have a better chance of succeeding.
These past few years I’ve been learning how to design and program scripts well. Now, I feel like it’s a good time to branch out and learn how to do other things. I hope to spend 2022 learning and getting better at building and 2D art/textures.
To everyone out there, I hope you’ll be successful in 2022! Looking forward to a better, less crazy year! Thanks for reading all of this, too.