Ultimate Tennis Championship 2K22 by hajpappan
After not finishing the last Ludum Dare I decided to go super minimalistic this time, and I think it worked out well. I kept the scope super tight, and had time to spend on some polish and tweaking the gameplay to a point where it is actually reasonably fun to play. I toyed with the idea of adding a global leaderboard, but I decided against it due to time constraints.
Enjoy this hyper realistic tennis simulator!
| Link | https://tredagens.itch.io/ultimate-tennis-championship-2k22 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/ultimate-tennis-championship-2k22 |
Ratings
| Overall | 917th | 3.357⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 580th | 3.476⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 917th | 3.071⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 927th | 3.452⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 1234th | 2.575⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 1015th | 2.353⭐ | 19🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 1302th | 2.556⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 15🗳️ | 19🗨️ |
I like those particles you put on the ball as it speeds up too, the sound effects are very satisfying and subtle stuff like the way the paddles shrink after the ball collides with it are all really nice touches. You mentioned your aim to keep scope small and how you got to put extra polish on as a result and I think the result was very nice.
The actual ability to get high scores feels a little arbitrary to me, though. With how the ball speeds up, I think all it takes is a low-high-low sort of pattern and you won't be able to make the return rally regardless of how quickly you try set up a plan be in the right spot at the right time - you just sail over the second low paddle because there's not enough time for gravity to do its work. If you get lucky and have paddle heights relatively close to one another then scoring higher is much easier/possible.
I don't know what sorts of restrictions are in place for paddle heights as the ball speeds up (if any) but maybe having some rule that increased horizontal speed limits the random range that the paddles can move to. Or maybe even more precisely, the bigger the different in heights after one paddle's random move, the smaller the difference has to be on the next random movement to try to make it unlikely players get an unwinnable pattern.
Could be that I wasn't really figuring out the best way to play, though. The highest I got was a 28980, but it really was just off of a very lucky series of middle-of-the-screen paddles.
Anyway, I had a fun time playing with the game and shooting for a high score. Nice work!