Alright, so I got this idea buzzing in my head the other day – “team kick creator dodgeball”. Sounds a bit weird, I know, but I thought it might make for a fun little game mechanic or something. So, I figured, let’s just dive in and see what happens. Can’t hurt to try, right?
First off, I just sat down and tried to visualize it. How would this even work? I pictured teams, obviously. And on each team, there’s this one special player, the ‘creator’. This person wouldn’t just play regular dodgeball; they’d have some extra juice. My main thought was giving them a way to ‘kick’ players – not like, booting them from the game server, but maybe a special move within the match itself.
Getting Started with the Basics
So, I opened up my usual game dev tools. Nothing fancy. Just started putting together a really basic scene. Threw in a simple flat area for the court, you know, the usual starting point. Then I got some basic character controllers working, just cubes sliding around for now. Gotta walk before you can run, or in this case, dodge.
Making the characters move and throw a standard ball was the easy part. Did that pretty quick. Just basic physics, click to throw, that sort of stuff.
Implementing the ‘Creator’ and ‘Kick’
Now for the core idea. The ‘creator’ role. I decided that at the start of a round, one player on each team gets randomly tagged as the creator. Maybe give ’em a little crown icon or something so everyone knows who they are. Simple enough.
The ‘kick’ mechanic was the real head-scratcher. I didn’t want it to be just pressing a button and someone disappears. That’s boring. So, I thought, what if the creator gets a special type of ball throw? Like, super-charged, maybe faster, maybe it glows. If the creator hits an enemy player with this specific throw, that player gets ‘kicked’ – maybe they get stunned or sent to a penalty box for a short time, like 10 seconds. Makes it skill-based, you gotta aim and land the shot.
Man, getting this special throw to feel right took ages. Honestly, it was a pain. Tweaking the speed, the cooldown, making sure it wasn’t ridiculously overpowered but still felt impactful. Had a bunch of dumb bugs too. Sometimes the ball would just fly off into nowhere. Other times the ‘kicked’ player wouldn’t return after their penalty time. Super frustrating debugging that mess.
Teams and Testing
Added some basic team logic next. Just color-coded the players, made sure normal throws couldn’t hit teammates. Friendly fire off, standard stuff. Although, I did consider letting the creator’s ‘kick’ shot hit teammates by accident. Adds a bit of risk and chaos, which feels very dodgeball-y.
Testing was mostly just me playing locally, controlling players on both teams. It’s clunky, but you gotta do what you gotta do when you’re working solo. Found some more issues:
- Sometimes the creator tag wouldn’t pass correctly if the current creator got hit.
- Physics occasionally spazzed out, especially with multiple balls flying.
- The temporary ‘kick’ effect sometimes just… didn’t wear off.
Fixed most of the critical stuff, but it’s still rough around the edges.
Where It’s At Now
So yeah, that’s the story so far. It’s not really a full game, more like a proof-of-concept. A very basic prototype of this “team kick creator dodgeball” idea. You can run around, throw balls, and the designated creator can try landing these special ‘kick’ shots to temporarily knock out opponents. It actually feels kinda fun when it works!
Still needs a ton of work, obviously. Better graphics, actual sounds, proper networking so people can play together, scoring, menus… the list goes on. But hey, for a quick experiment, I got the core mechanic roughed out. It was a decent way to spend some time, messing with ideas and squashing bugs. We’ll see if I ever take it further.
