Skew Pong's Jam Version

During the last Ludum Dare (49, theme : Unstable), I've made Skew Pong, adding instability to the classic Pong gameplay through a 3d game area that would be unstable and turn around on 2 different axis depending of the player's actions as well as the ball's movement. The game was playable either in local multiplayer (gamepads or same keyboard) or solo against AI.

The game was well received and my best result in a LD so far (139th Overall in Jam). With its well-defined small scope, it was also a perfect game to go with for a first try at a commercial release over the course of a few months. So, I decided to continue it after the LD results were out, and started working up towards a release.

The path towards release

I spent 3 months and a half, since late October until now, working on the game on my free time though I couldn't dedicate as much time as I'd have liked to it at some points (uni, exams, part-time job, moving out, organizing global game jam, etc... had quite a lot of stuff happening in my personal life those last few months). I also had to learn and deal with administrative stuff as a commercial release means you need to do the legal stuff like registering a business and all.

One of the first things I did was to rewrite some parts of the game, as code made in jams is often not very clean and not exactly made with upgradability or maintainability in mind due to the time constraints, as well as bugs being quite frequent in jam games. One of those parts I spent the most work on was my Menu&Buttons system to make it modulable & easily extendable (and it got extended quite a lot afterwards to answer the UI needs). I also worked on some new systems for stuff like Settings or Localization, which aren't things you focus on doing properly during a jam but are really important for a full release.

Next was improving the gameplay, adding in more content and improving replayability. I didn't want to touch too much at the base concept nor derive from it, and so chose the path of adding different game modes that would play with different parameters with a lot more fine-tuning than the jam version. The jam version only had a simple Instability setting (ranging from none to extreme) which would allow the board to move more or less. Instead, I separated it in multiple parts, so each axis' instability could be toyed with independently, as well as making more things modifiable like gravity, the camera's perspective (can be 3d or '2d') as well as more classic stuff like paddles' size or ball's speed. This, allows to explore the different possibilities that can be done with the base mechanics and propose different game modes to the player ranging from classic pong to an extreme mode (+ players can also access the parameters and toy with them to play custom modes).

Another important part was improving the game feel, which would go through balancing the game and polishing the game, adding in more juice. Balance is kind of an hard issue, especially when you've got rather unique mechanics to deal with. Fine-tuning the default 'Skew' mode was quite hard, and it took a lot of iterations, ending up with a balance very different from the jam's one (more dynamic/fast-paced, while trying to keep it beginner-friendly). Another side to balance was AI. The jam's AI was simply too good as with Pong being a rather simple game, making an unbeatable AI is very easy (just calculate where the ball will go, go there and done) while doing an AI that feels human and makes errors takes a lot of work. So, I iterated quite a lot on making the AI less reactive/more prone to errors and implemented different AI difficulties.
As for adding more juice to the game, it went through adding more feedback like coloring parts of the wall when a player is pushing the arena around, improving the core gameplay loop and doing a lot of work on the UI & Menus, etc...

After the release / What now ?

First, I'm planning to continue working a bit on Skew Pong in the coming weeks, as there's still a few things I think could be improved and that I want to add. There also might be some issues/bug encountered by the players that I'll have to fix.

After that, I don't know what I'll be working on next yet. I'm planning to take part in LD50 in April of course, and who knows, maybe it will give birth to my 2nd commercial game.

You can check out Skew Pong on Steam

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPdqruL4oyg