Ludum Dare Submission: Rocket Balls

For the first time, I’ve participated in a game jam and I can say with certainty that it was one of the best experiences I’ve had. It got me more excited about gaming and pushed me to a point of motivation that I’ve missed for so long! As a software engineer, what I really enjoyed was not thinking twice about coding style. It was just about what was the quickest, dirtiest way I can get this next piece done. With all my projects being considerably large I never get to do this and, man, did it feel good. It was like a cheat day, or I guess weekend. 

Why now?

I’ve been eyeballing game jams for years now but it’s hard to commit a weekend especially when you use your weekends for development/family time. But this time I had a little bit of an ulterior motive. My friend Kevin, who is a great programmer, was in a very similar position as I was when I was in school. He loves programming and he loves games, but somehow, no game programming under his belt. For me it wasn’t until I was forced by a class to do some game programming that I fell in love. Actually, I have a video of the first game programming I ever did here. We only had time to put in a single day together but that was all we needed. I convinced Kevin to spend all day with me jamming and offered to teach him Unity in the process. 

Boom, Ballshot!

Anyways we sat down and I introduced him to the basic layout and most common features. We create a ball and added a script to show how serializable members can be accessed through the GUI. Next, we added some gravity and a ball!

The next natural progression was to add tons of balls! Made dem ball rain! After that we added a room. By the way, the theme was Only One Room. Now it was time to review user input so we started with some basic camera controls for moving the camera with WASD and using the mouse input to look around like an FPS. Soon we had a gun, were shooting balls at other balls, and it was pretty fun!

Rocket Balls is Born

Michael Bureger later joined us and helped put the final touches on what is temporarily called Rocket Balls, thanks to Kevin’s superb originality and creativity (read that with a drawn out, sarcastic voice). If you’d like to try Rocket Balls out you can do so by downloading v1 here. Also check out our Ludum Dare page. If it’s down that is because we’re really whipping up a lot of traffic. Last time I checked we were up to 1 vote so were a pretty big deal. Probably looking at the next big e-sport. 

Screenshots of Final Submission

Download Rocket Balls V1 (Windows)