Heya!

As some months passed since the last bigger update, I want to share the current status of Pixel Tennis with you.

Game development is quite a journey for me as a side hobby and I’m doing it in no professional capacity. This also means, that some early design decisions, which looked great in the past, might become a burden in the future.

One example is the handling and networking of the match gameplay. With the intention of having a very lightweight server process, matches are not actually simulated on the server, as it is lacking the actual game engine or any kind of physics calculation. Instead, only a few key aspects of a match are validated and synced to the players. This works totally fine in the active playtest, but it also comes with some drawbacks. Especially regarding the planned additional game modes, which include spells, collectibles, ball targets and computer controlled opponents. All those things would need to be implemented twice. Once for the client, once for the “semi-blind” server to validate.

I also heard, that people from non EU regions experience lag or at least some form of latency when playing online. Even, if 2 Americans play against each other, the match is still routed through a server in Germany. On the other hand, most people finding Pixel Tennis on Steam check out the single player mode and do not play online anyway. So maybe, the local or offline play should gain a bit more attention.

Searching for potential solutions I also decided to check out the Open Source game engine Godot[godotengine.org]. What should I say? It is week 3 now and I honestly fell a bit in love on how doing certain things is so much easier and more intuitive compared to Unity. I even could solve the networking hurdles with onboard tools. However, it would require a complete rebuild of Pixel Tennis, which is not a rash decision to make. So at the current stage, I am validating this idea by extensively testing Godot to find the pros and cons of a potential switch.

For now, this likely means there won’t be any functional updates for a while. However, the current playtest remains fully functional and if you found bugs, I will squash them! Any progress made in the game will be carried over, regardless of the game’s future direction.

If you have any questions or tips, feel free to share them here or at one of the many other communication channels.

See you on the court!