Sumo Balls

Two player mode

Inspiration

Thinking back to the classic childhood game of push-sumo and the Minecraft sumo mini-game, it would be interesting to make a game based on that.

What it does

Objective and bameplay

Two or more players join a lobby as balls and begin on a circular platform and must use the mouse to control the direction that their ball will move in. Colliding with the other player's ball will cause both to be pushed back. If a player falls off the platform, the other player will gain one point and the next round will begin.

How we built it

We used Unity and Photon to create the multiplayer game and included it on the demo website by uploading to simmer.io.

Challenges we ran into

Learning C# and Unity was very difficult since we have never used either, we took programming courses at our school taught in Processing and Python. We have always been interested in playing and making games, so Unity seemed like a good choice.

In order to make the game multiplayer, we had to connect our game to a server and set-up a lobby system which was very difficult because we have never worked with networking. In addition, the different functionalities of Unity were very confusing in terms of how each component is related.

While our final game does have the bumping mechanic implemented, we found that the only way to have a collision occur the way we want in the real world is to have a much better understanding of networking, which we could not have in such a short timeframe.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Successfully creating a functional 3D multiplayer game in a language and platform that we have never used before in our first hackathon is a big one.

What we learned

Debugging skills in an environment with many moving parts, networking is a very difficult task and there are tradeoffs between comfort and accuracy, although physics can never be truly recreated in these settings.

In addition to learning about the technicalities of making games, we also began to understand the perspectives of game developers more. The next time that we see a bug in a game, we may react less negatively.