So, I had this weird idea kicking around in my head for a bit: a game mixing tennis and volleyball rules. Sounds kinda strange, I know, but I figured, why not give it a shot? Just something to tinker with, you know?
Getting the Ball Rolling
First things first, I fired up Unity. It’s just what I usually reach for when messing around with game ideas. Started super basic. Threw down a flat plane for the ground. Needed a court vibe, so I just stretched out some cubes to make boundary lines. Simple stuff. Then, the net. Found a free basic net model somewhere, dropped it in the middle. Looked kinda like a court, good enough for a start.
Next up, the ball. Just a standard sphere, really. Added a Rigidbody component so it could actually move and bounce around. Spent a bit of time tweaking the physics material – trying to get a bounce that wasn’t quite tennis-ball hard, but also not as floaty as a beach volleyball. Getting that ‘feel’ right took some fiddling.
Making Things Move
Okay, needed players. Or, well, something to hit the ball with. Didn’t want to get bogged down in character models, so I just made two simple blocks, like tall paddles, one on each side. Hooked them up to keyboard controls – WASD for one side, arrow keys for the other. Classic setup. Moving them left and right along their baseline was easy enough.
Now the interaction part. How do these paddles hit the ball? Added colliders to the paddles and the ball. Wrote a quick script. Basically, when the paddle collider touches the ball collider, push the ball away. Getting the push direction right was a bit annoying. Didn’t want it to just bounce off flatly, needed some way to aim it slightly, maybe based on where the ball hit the paddle. Kept it simple though, just adding force.
Mixing the Rules
Here’s where the tennis/volleyball mashup got tricky.
The Net:
The ball absolutely had to go over the net. Added a collider to the net model. If the ball hit the net collider, I made it just kind of lose momentum and fall down, maybe bounce back slightly. Point for the other player. Simple penalty.
The Ground:
Like volleyball, the ball shouldn’t bounce on your side before you hit it over. Like tennis, it should bounce on the opponent’s side to score. So, I divided the ground plane collider into two halves using trigger zones. If the ball entered the ground trigger on your side, boom, point for the opponent. If it landed in the opponent’s ground trigger zone, point for you!
Out of Bounds:
Also needed boundaries. If the ball hit the ground outside those lines I made earlier, it was out. Figured out which side hit it last (this took a bit of logic, tracking the last paddle touch) and gave the point to the other player.
Polishing (Just a Little)
Played it myself for a bit, controlling both paddles awkwardly. It kinda worked! But it felt raw. The paddles felt stiff. The ball speed was maybe too consistent. Added some super basic sound effects – a ‘thwack’ for hitting the ball, a ‘bounce’ sound, maybe a simple ‘ding’ for scoring. Found some free sounds online. Made a huge difference, actually.
Also slapped together a very basic UI using Unity’s UI system. Just text elements to show the score for Player 1 and Player 2. Needed a way to reset the ball after a point, so I added that – just respawn the ball above one side to serve.
Where It Stands
So, that’s the journey so far. It’s definitely not a finished game by any stretch. The controls are basic, the physics could still use tweaking, and the rules mashup still feels a bit weird in practice. Sometimes scoring feels a bit random depending on how the physics engine decided to bounce things. But hey, it was a fun experiment! Went from a vague idea to something playable, even if it’s just a simple prototype. Learned a bit more about Unity physics and collision logic along the way. That’s the main thing, right? Just building stuff and seeing what happens.
