let’s talk about the game and tactics and less about why it doesn’t sell or why the design is fundamentally flawed. it’s a lot more fun, i promise!
i need to peace the fuck out of this thread, actually. fuck. this shit is causing me pain. and i’m probably causing others pain. i’m a real piece of work. fuck.
I played level 4 of the arcade mode last night!
choppy is a huge jerk holy wow
So is calling it a touchdown or a home run or a sports point humor or appreciation? Or does it not matter?
As a side note:
I do appreciate this! AI that has personality! I also appreciate that you can play as a literal defender. Very cool.
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it’s a little of both to me! the whole tone of videoball, again, seems like a game that’s just really excited that it exists at all. it can seem a little over the top with the references to scoring in other sports but I don’t take that as the game making fun of them. videoball is just excited that you scored at all, so it picks the first name for scoring it can find and yells it at you because holy crap that’s cool!
it’s excited in the way that people got excited for basketball in the 90s. basketball was fucking magical in the 90s and there was so much unabashed joy around it! the SLAM DUNK, despite having already been a thing before, was embraced as one of the coolest things you could do in basketball because a person flies through the air and puts the ball into the hoop without any messing around. so videoball’s little quips and stuff remind me of how fun all of that was
and that soundtrack holy shit
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I’m probably going to buy this darn game in a month when I’ve got free time, even though I have so far been very bad at it.
I swore very hard swears at the 8 year old who beat me last time 
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I bought this on PC, y’all, so I will try to get in on it with you at some point.
need one more for 2v2 right now if there are any ps4 players around!
the terms indicate the specifics of the action that delivered the point. a “homerun” is a ball that is slammed from your home zone, through the neutral zone, through the away zone, and into the goal without another shot touching it. we have names for the goal types because in local mode players can adjust the points values of each type. we use sports terms because people know sports terms, and because we like sports. also we did study historic rules evolutions in sports while designing this game.
(you say “making up sports jargon is fun!” though i assure you, if we called a homerun a “crossfield smash” or what have you, i’d receive the same weird hater emails containing the word “pretentious”.)
whoa, uh, okay!
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Ok well, I did not know that about the scoring and that is awesome.
We’re making no pretense that the game is simple. The game looks the way it has to. It looks simple because looking simple makes it easy to process the information. “Gamers” interpret simplistic visuals as some “ironic” anti-triple-A “statement” (I have heard all these words exist in one sentence about VIDEOBALL, of various remixes, in many podcasts). “Why do ‘hardcore’ gamers only acknowledge photorealistic graphics?” or “Why do e-sports all have metaphors?” can lead to an interesting conversation!!
To clarify, for the sake of everyone infected with my use of the phrase “dead in the water”: we didn’t actually expect the game to sell! It got stuck in Business Limbo for about a year, and then we had a new publisher who wanted to take their time with it.
So, for complete clarification’s sake: “the game didn’t make money” does not mean we are in debt. We are so totally not in any debt at all: the publisher invested in us. They accept responsibility if it doesn’t recoup their investment. It’s wonderful. The answer to “How much worse could it be?” is “Astronomically”.
I didn’t mean to sound so portentous in my last big post! I was having a bad day. We have two little mobile games in the pipeline right now; each is for all types of phones. They’re going to be cool. Please get them~~~
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have you tried bringing videoball to the game nest monthly meetups in SF? I figure you’ve heard of them already but you know, just in case
This whole time I was under the impression that a homerun was a hit in baseball that let fat dudes run around all the bases. My bad. Thanks for clarifying! Aye…
Also, you think crossfield smash would offend people about your pretentiousness? Like more than you calling it a known thing that means something completely different? You never thought of long goal or full court shot or all-the-way-score or almost anything else? You know, for clarity. @Bee how would you feel about it being called “long shot”?
It’s not even like your game is offensive or even unfun to play. This shit is just infuriating, though. Literally the only aesthetic choices made in the game are annoying. And this defense of it is just mind boggling.
Like a Steam forum in here.
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Cheerful pop culture referencing is probably ubiquitous in 201X but this game doesn’t seem anything like the worst instance of it
yeah jesus, maybe take a step back if somebody calling something in their game a home run is infuriating you
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Yeah, I think I will. I started my stance as “this is annoying”, but everyone else defending the annoying things is just what was throwing me for a loop. If it were my game I’d be looking at all criticisms and seeing how it affected people, but like, whatever, it’s not so at least Tim isn’t broke.
i’m imagining a sports manga in which VIDEOBALL is an underground sport and a talented young individual is training hard and climbing the ladder with determination and skill
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man, they have “field goals” in basketball and football both . . . i don’t know what else to tell you, man. maybe go take a look in the mirror – you might have accidentally put your Bad Time Hat on 
(also, yes – any combination of words i use anywhere bothers somebody. commenters and email ghosts wheel out the word “pretentious” from nowhere, to nowhere, for nothing.)
i know you said you were going to step away from this discussion; then, however, you said
yeah, i did look at a whole lot of criticisms for about two years, by taking the game to a bunch of places, and watching people play! literally no one had a visceral negative reaction to the use of the phrase “home run”, or any kind of negative reaction to any of the terms in the game at all. i expected that maybe someone might, though i dared not imagine what sort of person that person would be like.
people did, however, say lots and lots of things, after i begged them to be honest. i trust that many of them were honest. the game ended up changing in hundreds of tiny ways. what exists now represents a long journey from the original concept of “asteroids soccer”. i greatly appreciate all the criticism and feedback i received throughout the design process.
also, not all baseball players are fat. in fact, most of them are in pretty good shape.
i feel like, maybe, you could pass a polygraph test where all the questions were “are you a hater?” and you replied “no” every time
it’s ok man . . . i’ve been a hater before, too! it’s a particular mood a person gets in. i don’t hate you (or anyone) for it
. . . in closing, my comments about Not Being In Debt were not directed to your criticism of the use of the word “home run” in VIDEOBALL. i intended those comments as a contribution to the many other posts comprising a discussion of the financial performance of the game. here i must apologize again, because clearly i’ve done something wrong somewhere in my life if a person i don’t know perceives me as the exact sort of scumbag who would reply to “i don’t like that word in your game” with “well, see here, i’m not in debt”.
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I just had a vision of vectorscreen VIDEOBALL and now I have unsated hunger