Every game has details that need to be tweaked to feel right, especially in the character controls of a realtime game. I always leave some time for this.

But this time I really set myself up with a vast multi-dimensional search space by having weird gravity, jetpacks, roller skates, rockets with explosions, and a ball.

Here is where I ended up:

Considering the level of risk I had Sunday when I woke up at noon to a couple of feedback emails saying the test build was not fun, I'm pretty happy with where I ended up.

Does everyone else have these experiences of going to bed Saturday thinking it's great and waking Sunday to a dawning horror that rewrites all priorities?

I did a lot of ripping and tearing of things in the name of finding the right feel. During the course of the compo my control set for the movement went down from 4 keys (WASD) to two keys (WS) to one key (W). Making the player automatically travel clockwise was an important choice, because it reduces the control complexity and hides a few warts with how it feels to teeter right on the lip of a sharp angle in the smooth terrain.

Eventually I had the control feeling good (to me at least!) but then the problem was "how do I force the player to have fun?" The ball is there to serve that purpose, but it was just not FUN. Hitting the ball with rockets was too hard, and the results of headbutts and splash knocks to the ball were wild and unpredictable, there was no sense of agency.

The key to unlocking Sunday in the final stretch was the realization that I was looking in the wrong place for the problem. I was tinkering with the rocket physics, and falling into the difficult hole of projectile velocity inheritance in fast-moving shooters, which is a known unsolvable problem. I was messing with the explosion knockback parameters, and had stubbed out a special code path for direct rocket hits. The list of things to investigate was getting LONGER not shorter, and I still had no screen transitions or sound.

But eventually I realized that most problems on my list were all coming from the same root cause: the ball was too bouncy! It was really that simple. You can go into the mode select screen in my game and try the "bouncy" mode, I left it in the game to gape at how random it feels when the ball is bouncing all over the place.

After I removed the bounciness, the ball settled into the nooks in the terrain, and made advancing the ball a more direct and predictable result of your actions. Suddenly the game component felt reasonable.

More tweaking could have produced a better result, but that baseline did the trick and from there I just whipped it into an actual GAME and synthesized a few sound effects.

I fixed one last bug with about 10 minutes to go, and put my pencil down.

In the end I doubt the game forces you to have the fun that is available, which is a shortcoming. But I'm happy enough that there is some fun to be had, and hopefully the game at least invites you to have it.

Biggest mistake: As soon as I played after release I realized matches going until 10 way totally wrong, and it should have been 4 or 5. I cannot believe I made that mistake, it's so obvious.