BBALL TACTICS Playable Demo Out Now
Okay so just a quick update: The demo has been out for almost three weeks now and we’ve been making some just general fixes to it. I think there is another bigger update due soon for it that just solves more basic errors that have come through playthroughs and testing. But now on to the release at hand: Basketball Tactics aka BBTTX aka BBT aka Tactics Ballre: Let Us Slam Together.
The TL;DR of this is that the link is here:
https://talesofgames.itch.io/basket-ball-tactics
NOTES:
- Game is not thoroughly play-tested, but should run fine on most setups.
- No real work has been done on the game in a while, it’s essentially in the state we last had it working.
- IT IS ONLY LOCAL TWO-PLAYER. There is no AI.
- You can play with 1 or 2 controllers.
- There are DESIGN DOCUMENTS included in the zip file, just check out the DESIGN DOC folder. Most of that stuff is mentioned below.
Okay so now for some backstory -
The genesis of this game might be apparent – to solve the suspicious lack of bball at the beginning of the game. If you have played the demo you can play the Uschi Baller Quest and if you succeed, you end up playing a bball game against 3 duergars. That game, however is not included in the B2 project itself, and rather built on it’s own with a two-stage strategy:
- Build the game on it’s own (as compile times were atrocious at the start of the project) with the intention of eventually adding it back into the single-player Barkley 2 game. This means making turn-based AI.
- In the standalone project, we would develop the game with the purpose of releasing it as a mobile, touch-capable, multiplayer game. This would be released at some point before B2 as a fun teaser.
From the original design document, I created a few playthrough videos using a chess board and some color-coded tokens. The idea was to go through step-by-step what the game would play like and hopefully allow pasty enough agency to fill in the blanks and adjust the mechanics during development.
BBALL TACTICS PRACTICAL VIDEO ONE
BBALL TACTICS PRACTICAL VIDEO TWO
From there, programmer extraordinaire known as pasty set to work developing the systems that were needed, always with the intent on this being a multiplayer game. There were many rules that you can see evolving overtime from the initial design doc in the DEVELOPMENT NOTES that pasty kept meticulous track of. Those development notes are included in the zip.
After a while, a I created a new basic mockup of how the UI might work… with my focus being much more on WHEN the player interacts with the screen and leaving the HOW up to the code. Here is that video which also shows a decent example of the game play:
BBALL TACTICS UI MOCKUP
From there, we worked on the MENU and Multiplayer Lobby experiences. Also pasty was diligent to get the game running on mobile, so there does exist some touch-based controls for the game while running on iOS and Android.
From there, having spent the majority of the work in the code, he then came up with the existing radial design for the UI. This works a lot better than the vertical list that I had! Once we had that locked in, we started working with frankie to add enough sprites to get the animation system down.
What you are playing is the result of that.