Stick Ballers - Physics based, analog controlled, stick-football action (my first game)

Hey fellow bombers!

Thought you might be interested to check out my Rocket League inspired, analog-controlled, physics based stick footballer! It's got style, groovy sounds, fast gameplay and passionately modeled physics! I think I'm onto something unique that I'm very surprised that I haven't seen others do before in terms of control scheme. It's a bit challenging at first but there's a lot of depth there.

Been working on the game for a little over a month, and it's my first game. It's still in an early stage so I would really really appreciate any feedback you have, positive or negative!

Oh and the name is inspired by the legendary Wind Jammers, which I am ashamed to say I have not yet tried! Haha.

Use chrome on a desktop (or laptop, just not mobile) and a dual analog stick controller. The reson to use chrome is that it is the only browser I have properly tested it on now. I know there are issues with frame rate and sound when I tried firefox, and I have yet to address this!

If you're on an unperformant computer there are graphics settings by pressing start (option on ds4).

Hope y'all like it! Thanks for any feedback!

Greetings from Sweden,

Gustaf

https://www.stickballers.com

Not sure if this violates advertising rules on the forums, but it is a free alpha version, so I assume it's okay? Anyway, I spent about 10 minutes in this. It's pretty cool, good job on making this! It probably ran about at 15 fps on my (by this point decidedly mid-tier) GTX 1060, but that comes with it being in alpha. Not sure how much the quality of my PC is related to the performance though, with it working in a browser? It's a cool concept and it could be great for some mindless fun if you refine it, but (perhaps partly due to the low framerate) the thing that you should then chase is exactly what Rocket League does absurdly well, which is the feel of the controls. The weight of the cars and the ball, the movement speed, and the way everything interacts makes Rocket League awesome to play in the first 60 seconds. But then it's also completely physics-based, and there is almost limitless depth in the way the cars and ball interact. Even through all of the competitiveness and toxity of the higher ranks, simply driving around the Rocket League pitch and hitting that ball feels great from minute one through hour 2000 of playtime.

Of course, the brilliant balance that Rocket League achieved with this is the reason it's perhaps one of the greatest games every (in my opinion), and so it by nature is very hard to achieve. But as a lofty goal it's probably what you should strive for within your own scope (depending on where you intend to take this game of course.) Perhaps the ball needs to be a bit more weighty, or you need some kind of straight edge on the baton? Because getting the ball to go where I wanted wasn't immediately intuitive. The baton and the ball just sort of rolled away from each other time and time again, and it was not obvious how to get the timing right to set up a smacking shot. Of course, a higher framerate would've made it easier as well.

Also, when I tried to change the graphics setting to improve the framerate, first the game froze, and when I reloaded the page and tried again, I could get into the menu but the options would always immediately flip back to their original setting (i.e. "shadows" was locked to on). This makes it harder for people to try the game, I imagine, if the problem is not only there for me.

Regardless, great work! Making this is already a very big task. Good luck with the rest of your process.

@dudacles: Thanks a ton for the lengthy reply! The feedback is great.

I agree with most of what you said, Rocket League is also one of my favorite games of all time. The depth allowed for by the analog and physics based nature of RL is what I am also aiming for here.

It is quite strange that you got such poor performance, although it may have to do with what browser you used. I have been targeting chrome, and for me and friends I have sent it to I get 60fps with a 1080 and friends with higher refresh rate monitors are getting 140fps.

I think your feedback about the controls being difficult might be possible to address with some training modes that I am thinking of implementing. As you can see from the trailer I have gotten quite good at it, so it is definitely possible to learn how to play it well, the question is if people will be willing to invest the time in order to do it.

With regards to the weight of the ball and so on, there are many parameters to play with in the physics settings, although in the final game this obviously shouldn't be up to the user to find good settings.

I think the issue of shadows not being changable is an issue I also had when trying in firefox, but as I said and should have mentioned before I am targeting chrome and will optimize for other browsers later. Would be awesome if you could check and see if it works better in chrome! The phong lighting setting is currently broken, that's the one that caused the lock-up.

Would you mind letting me know your other specs if you have time to test it in chrome and it still performs badly? If you don't have time of course I already appreciate the response.

Thanks!