Okay, so today I decided to mess around and try to make a game that’s kind of like volleyball. I’ve always liked the sport, but I’m no good at it in real life, so I figured, why not try it in a digital space?
First, I needed a basic setup. I grabbed a game engine I’m sort of familiar with – nothing fancy, just something to get things rolling. I started by creating a simple court. Just a rectangle, really, with a line down the middle to act as the net. I didn’t bother with fancy textures or anything, just plain colors to start.
Next up: players. I made two little stick figures, one for each side. I used basic shapes for these guys, again, keeping it super simple. The important thing was to get them moving.
Movement! This was the first real challenge. I wanted the players to be able to move left and right, and of course, jump. I fiddled around with some basic input controls, assigning keys for movement. It took a bit of tweaking to get the jump feeling somewhat right – not too floaty, not too stiff.
- Created a rectangular court.
- Added a line in the middle for the net.
- Made two stick figure players.
- Implemented basic movement (left, right, jump).
Then came the ball. I just used a circle for this. The real fun started when I tried to get the ball physics working. I wanted it to bounce realistically off the court and, hopefully, off the players.
I added some basic physics properties to the ball – gravity, bounciness, that sort of thing. Getting it to interact with the court was easy enough. The tricky part was the players.
I spent a good chunk of time trying to figure out how to make the ball react when it hit a player. I wanted the players to be able to “hit” the ball, sending it back over the net. I experimented with different approaches, and to be honest, it was a lot of trial and error. There must have been a error inside the physics coding part. I am not a professional coder, you know?
Eventually, I managed to get something that sort of worked. It wasn’t perfect, but the ball did bounce off the players, and with some careful timing, you could actually get a bit of a rally going. It felt pretty good to see the ball go back and forth, even if it was a bit janky.
What did it looks like?
It looked simple, the ball sometimes went crazy, and the players were hard to control. But you know what? It was kind of fun! It definitely felt like a very, very rough version of * is still lots of things I want to add to this game.
This whole thing was just a quick experiment, a way to spend a few hours and see what I could come up with. It’s nowhere near a finished game, but it was a fun little project. Maybe I’ll come back to it someday and add some more features, like actual scoring, maybe some different player abilities. But for now, I’m pretty happy with my little volleyball-ish creation.
