BUNG BALL
ROLE
Indie
DESCRIPTION
Bung Ball is a multiplayer platform fighter where players attempt to knock their opponents off the platform and remain as the last one standing. It incorporates fun but challenging physics based gameplay. Players also have the ability to record their own custom taunts and put custom designs on their ball!
BACKSTORY
Bung Ball started as a somewhat of an inside joke with some friends on Discord and eventually evolved into my first steam release ever. I had an idea of a very simple game involving hard to weighty feeling hard to control balls where you would try to knock other players off a platform sumo style. I had played games like this before but never any that gave the player total freedom to be silly. Giving players abilities on top of the basic ball gameplay elevated the fun factor and gave way to the idea of custom ball pictures and taunts. These features turned out to be one of the reasons why Bung Ball is considered one of my most fun games to play despite the basic looks and bugs.
TECHNICAL HISTORY (FOR NERDS)
Originally I built out the foundation of Bung Ball using Unity and Photon Unity networking (PUN). I added a basic lobby and player management system with a couple basic abilities to test with some friends. Problems started to arise quickly though as I didn't think ahead about non-deterministic physics (Simulations are different across client's systems) before selecting a networking solution. This led to unplayable jittery movement and wonky physics interactions between player's balls. I researched solutions and sadly came to the conclusion that I need to switch networking solutions to a deterministic one. I switched out PUN for Photon Fusion which meant I had to rework most of my current networking. After this gameplay was smooth and fun so I decided to work on other features I had wanted to implement like custom ball pictures and taunts. This was an especially difficult task because it meant I would somehow have to allow players to upload images and audio recorded from their webcam and microphone to a server and link the player's information in a database. I bought some cheap file hosting services and started to implement this solution. After much headache, I had a working system that allowed players to capture audio and images in game and seamlessly use them directly after. To connect with the database the game simply sends a web request with parameters to a PHP file that communicates with said database. This way player rank and other useful information can be stored. Presently, in app purchases are being added to the game as well as Steam integration for better long term support.
ENVIRONMENT DESIGN
SCREENSHOTS
