I'm making a free Giant Bomb themed sports game inspired by retro classics Windjammers, Sanrio World Smash Ball! and many other "ponglikes". This is my pathetic attempt to blog about its development. If you'd like to understand my madness a little better than you might care to check out my other entries below.

1. Games of future past: Giant Bomb Jammers

2. Dev Log #465 - Hard Knocks & Cannibalism

So Near and yet So Far

Work on "Codename: Jammers" (as I'm calling it now) continues, but unfortunately, I still don't have anything to release yet. This has made me think about just releasing my old pre-alpha to the public, but I've realized that I'm still not happy with that build at all and would need to spend some time improving it before doing so, but that would be very counterproductive. Since any more work done on that old version would be thrown out with the next update. So I guess there's no looking back. I'm also pretty excited about the improvements to this new version of the game and I hope this will make it worth the wait. The biggest challenge yet has been implementing the new player input and character selection system. Once this is finished the rest of the work should go more quickly.

Current Features I'm working on for the first public release:

• New player input/character selection system.

• Improved player controls and physics.

• New scoring/points system.

• New computer-controlled opponents.

• Bug fixes.

Future Features / Wish List:

• Ryan Davis.

• More characters.

• Character specific special moves.

• Online multiplayer.

Design Choices

I thought this week I'd go into a little bit more about the design choices behind the game. The first decision was to decide exactly what the game would be. Should it be an exact clone of Windjammers? In the end, I decided against this for a number of reasons. First of all, Windjammers was designed around hardware limitations and I felt that strictly adhering to this would only benefit the most hardcore of retro fans. This also made my life a bit easier because it meant I didn't have to painstakingly recreate every little nuance, and I was free to be more creative and change things up a bit.

For example, the original Windjammers was controlled with a standard 8-way joystick. The immediate problem here is that it means players can only really shoot in 3 directions, since up and down is kind of useless. The designers addressed this problem by making up and down actually fire the disc at 45° and angling the joystick 45° actually fired the disc at 22° (approximately). This gave players 5 directions to fire in, but it's still kind of limited. So not adhering to this design limitation means I can increase the amount of directions, and therefore precision, substantially.

Not being forced to create an exact clone also allowed me to play with a few of the mechanics. In Windjammers, when you catch the disc you stop moving completely, but in my game, I decided to let players still move, but at a much slower speed. This worked pretty well, but I've been looking into ways to improve this further and prevent players from holding the bomb forever. At one point I was even thinking of dropping (no pun intended) the grab mechanic completely, but I do prefer being able to grab and throw the bomb, since it gives you a lot more control and precision. This is also the one feature that I think makes Windjammers unique in comparison to other “Pong like” games.

Speaking of other “Pong like” games, Windjammers is not the only game I've actually taken inspiration from. Sanrio World Smash Ball! is an obvious one, but I've also gotten some ideas from another Neo Geo game called “Bang Bead”. I wouldn't consider it a good game, but the interface and artwork gave me some great ideas and It's actually what directly “inspired” the duder selection screen.

Tough Decisions

Supernormalstep's art worked perfectly here and I'm really happy with how it all turned out, but unfortunately I'm afraid I'm going to have to get rid of it :( As much as I love it, it's really limiting my ability to add new characters to the game. Supernormalstep may of course add new characters in the future, but I think it's unrealistic an unreasonable to depend on him for this. So expect a new player selection screen in the next release. This is just one of those design choices you really hate to make.

In my next blog post I hope to go into more details about the improvements to gameplay and also let you actually see the progress I've made. Thanks for reading!