VIDEOBALL

King of Posters
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There’s a pretty huge difference in basic approachability between them, to, and it really speaks to great (even accidentally-great!) design. I like VIDEOBALL a lot but it’s not the type of design that’s elegant, it’s just stripped down to be what it needs to be. It can be confusing to watch and it’s not clear at first how charging leads to blocks and when that’s good or bad. It’s a game that didn’t naturally come out but had to be forced into the appropriate liquid balance.

But put anyone down in front of Rocket League and you’ll see them play Rocket League. The back-and-forth is there, they know what they’re doing, it looks like a bone-a-fide game of Rocket League. I watched my 6- and 8- year-old niece and nephew pick it up and they instantly got it. Yeah, it’s cribbing from soccer but “soccer with cars” work and it’s executed tightly enough that it’s invisible design.

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tomorrow I promise! what times are the best times?

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Had a lot of fun playing local 2v2 the other day. I don’t think it’d really clicked when I played it before, but I’d challenge anyone and their friends to not enjoy it in this format. Also had lots of fun messing with rules in different ways to handicap the one person who was actually okay at the game.

FWIW we played Nidhogg, Samurai Gun, and Tower Fall too, and Videoball was my favourite by far.

Playing on my own I find the sound design a bit obnoxious (like it’s really sharp and we sounding and makes my ears itch), but it also worked really well in this local multiplayer context : ) Easy to hear over peoples’ laughing and talking and stuff, without having to turn it up too loud.

I’ll probably be popping into the Discord on weekends : )

Do I need to post pictures of old tennis equipment?

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honestly if I released an indie multiplayer game and the online was broken on a console on day one I would sue my publisher.

I mean, I wouldn’t, because I wouldn’t have any money to sue them, but you get what I’m saying.

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i mean… it’s not really a fair comparison, then, is it? unless your niece/nephew had no concept of soccer, it’s a very straightforward analogue. i’m pretty sure absolutely no one knows what the fuck is going on in american football until they’ve spent many hours paying attention to it. it’s still a great sport!

videoball is by far the most elegant esport i’ve ever seen. it absolutely puts rocket league to shame in that regard.

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Asteroid soccer on
My Personal Computer?
I’ll play if you buy

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rocket league gets its accessibility by piggybacking two of the absolute most understandable concepts on the planet: cars and soccer. there are few places on this planet that you could be alive long without knowing what both are and a basic model of how they function. i was playing with car toys pretty much since birth and I was literally playing rec soccer at 6.

As for the game itself, RL uses every fucking button on the controller and STILL has no optimal control scheme. Give someone who has never played a game vb and rl and see which one is easier to play. fuck, how many games have a control scheme as accessible and easy to understand as a single analog stick, a single button, and pause. I mean come on here. Rocket League possesses only the illusion of elegance by coopting concepts nearly everyone already understands.

That’s not even going into the camera quagmire

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That’s all that’s needed, though! Trick people into playing your game, and once they are hooked they’re forced to embrace all the weird corners and complexity.

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That’s completely fair, but that initial choice was still a design choice and it can be respected as such. I’m also impressed how well Rocket League works if you don’t touch the camera, if you don’t understand air play, if you barely understand how boost works. It scales perfectly down in that case.

The metaphors they use carry meaning and VIDEOBALL discarding metaphors was a choice that has ramifications too. I like it more that it doesn’t have dudes running around, but in this very thread we see very design-literate folks talking about how it’s not clear what’s going on and they don’t feel connection to it.

VIDEOBALL is a very, very good game but it’s not a popular game and it’s fair to assess what design choices impacted that. At some point the goodness of a multiplayer game is based on its playerbase; when choices are made about accessibility and mass appeal they can often be better design decisions just based on how they keep the game alive.

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so tim gets into it more in his gdc talk, but there are all kinds of restrictions and rules around sports that prevent people from hurting each other because we’re made of flesh and bone and if the objective is “get the ball to the other side” and the rules are “by any means necessary” no one would play. that’s why we have penalties for breaking the rules in physical sports; it’s a compromise we make in order to (ostensibly) ensure the physical health of the participating players. but because of this, physical sports just can’t be perfect mental and physical contests, because a perfect mental/physical contest is JUST FIGHTING, and even the UFC has rules

when you remove the physicality from a sport, you remove the restrictions based around those assumptions, creating the opportunity for mental contests that are much closer to “perfect” (according to the designer) than physical sports allow. videogames seem like the perfect medium for this kind of thing, and a lot of games are really interesting explorations of these dynamics between players. you mentioned rocket league and hokra and sports friends in general; those are the games that get there!

but for some reason the public has latched onto games like league of legends and cs:go and dota as “e-sports”, which is kind of insane. tim goes on an extended thought experiment trying to create a perfect sport and ending up at 5v5 dome goal-tennis, which is unwatchable and unrefereeable, and yet that’s not too far off from what mainstream videogames see as watchable, digestible sporting events. they’re games where vision and knowing where other players are and denying that information to the other team is a KEY component, if not the most important component of strategy and tactics and yet we still haven’t figured out a way to display this in a way that makes it easy for others to understand without having some kind of background in videogames

so videoball ends up being a reaction to this kind of over-designed thing. it IS visually complex and there are a lot of moving parts, but it’s in the service of giving the players all the information they need to succeed. one of the bigger themes of ziggurat was “one perfect shot”, in that no matter how cluttered and overwhelming the game can get, the player is always one perfect shot away from clearing it and progressing on, and it’s up to the player to figure out how to do that. I see a lot of the same thing in videoball, except now the opponents are other literal people

videoball ends up being a “sporting game” in the way that physical sports are; that is, nothing in the design of the game itself obfuscates information from the participants. obfuscation CAN happen, but only by the participants in service of deceiving their opponents for an edge. rocket league obfuscates information from players by limiting the players’ perspective, only allowing for players to change it through skilled movement of a control stick (to change the camera). this is a design decision meant to replicate the way that soccer players often have a limited perspective and must rely on their instincts and training to predict not only where their opponents will go, but where their own teammates will be. so the skill of a soccer player is determined in some part by this “sixth sense” kind of thing

videoball goes in a different direction, where instead of limiting the player’s perspective, the game takes advantage of players’ innate limits on attention. all of the information is there, and you have everything you need to make the “perfect” play, but most of the time you can’t because you literally can’t focus on everything you need to at the same time. this makes videoball more of a videogame in some senses, but in other ways it’s a sport distilled down to decision making.

omg it’s been 45 minutes

edit: someone needs to make a game called JUST FIGHTING

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I guess Rocket League achieves more soul, while Videoball (yes I’m going to spell it like that) goes straight to purity of mechanics.

Nothing wrong with either approach, but most people aren’t inherently attracted to purity if there’s nothing else behind.

Another comparison would be Enter the Gungeon (casual, feels right immediately) vs Nuclear Throne (polished over many months to achieve purity)

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I want to think through this a little more because I think there are very interesting reasons for why people don’t find themselves “connected” to videoball even though it’s literally a joystick and one button

I think what makes rocket league work is how it successfully takes those two concepts (cars + soccer) and puts them together in a way that is easily digestible for anyone. but imo it makes assumptions on the part of the player that create this ease of understanding, one of which is how a player conceives of a videogame at all

right now the predominant paradigm for describing a videogame to anyone is: you (the player) controls an avatar (the player-character) that interacts with other avatars (non-player characters) in a designed world with rules (the environment) and the dynamics of the interactions between these parties creates the “game” (omg I am SUPER simplifying it here this is not a rigorous definition of videogame omg)

it’s this manifestation of avatars within worlds that separates rocket league from videoball – in rocket league, the avatar’s relationship with the world it’s in is way way easier to understand in part because of how it borrows from pre-existing concepts. it’s not that hard to imagine yourself in that car (or driving that car remotely) because rocket league presupposes how you conceive of yourself within a videogame and takes advantage of it. note that this is also how like 90% of mainstream videogames also work, so it’s not like it’s a special technique or anything, it’s just how videogames are these days

(also this explains the proliferation of survival games with slight variations on theme)

tim has literally said that “[the player] is the character” in videoball. and because of this small change in perspective the dynamic between the player and the game changes completely. the avatar no longer represents a character that is both OF the videogame (digetically) as well as a representative of you. instead it is JUST a representative of you. that’s it. because videoball isn’t a “world”, it’s just a game, if that makes any sense

this is where I think the weirdness around feeling “connected” to the game happens – people just aren’t used to thinking of avatars in videogames as manifestations of themselves yet

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Hmm, I’d normally think of that as the thickness of the fantasy in the game; Rocket League’s is decently light but present, VIDEOBALL’s is nonexistent, character-based games like League of Legends and Overwatch have it pretty heavy.

The fantasy gives players another axis to enjoy the game on; there certainly are players who enjoy League and Overwatch more for their character and hanging out in the culture than actually playing the game. VIDEOBALL is meant to chameleon into your pre-existing culture but that paradoxically isn’t interesting before you buy/play the game.

I don’t think the avatar/player barrier is that important? It’s real pliable in most games and players don’t give it a lot of conscious thought. It has a lot of spillover effects to other parts of the game, though; similar to first- vs. third-person cameras; the controls may be similar but the design has to change around that.

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it’s honestly not important in most videogames! it may spill over to various design decisions but it doesn’t really affect the way the game is perceived. although part of me thinks that the avatar/player interaction is just ignored because of pre-existing paradigms around videogames, and people are now starting to think about this. the rise of physical games and short game experiences make me think that’s the case but I may just be projecting

BUT: videoball is like the one game I can think of where this totally matters a lot! and that’s because videoball wants you to think of yourself as a player of the game the same way people think of themselves as players of any sport like basketball or soccer or w/e. that’s the issue that videoball is dealing with. it has to simultaneously sell itself as a videogame that people want to play at the same time it sells itself as a different way to think of games and sports, and that’s super difficult

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Yeah, there’s no scene to support this type of experience and it doesn’t fit a narrative about ‘what’ it is.

Speaking of, one of my favorite things in game is interrogating the player’s relationship to the world and the avatar because it’s so easy and it’s the only medium where the creator can actually directly speak to the audience and interact in a limited way. It’s real neat and weird and dangerous and I like it in the same way that I like Don Quixote and Infinite Jest and I especially like how bending the fiction layers lets you make jokes without disrupting serious stakes.

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I spent some time with Videoball (thanks @rin!). I understand it a little more, but I need more clarification on basic mechanics. How many levels of triangles are there? What are the different properties of the different levels? When do you want to drop blocks?

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warning: long irrelevant rant that’s (probably) more about me than the game (aside: how do i spoiler text?)

i guess i just don’t care about why the game has thus far been unsuccessful. it’s not like the game is going to suddenly add tanks or supersonic acrobatic rocket-powered battle-cars or whatever else. it’s done. it exists as it exists. if people are going to enjoy the game, they are going to enjoy it on its merits as-is, which are numerous and joyous.

this conversation frustrates me for a variety of reasons. i can see myself becoming defensive and angry that it seems people just don’t seem to “get it” (or connect with it? i am acutely aware of my perceived elitism about a 2D game with one button). this is 100% a fault with me and not with anyone else.

a lot of people here seemed to like ziggurat. videoball is more or less the crystallized competitive form of ziggurat. all of the things that actually made ziggurat sing mechanically are refined, expanded, and heightened contextually. it’s just not an arcade/survival-style single-player game. you need other people to play! which is fine; you need two or more people to play most sports. ziggurat having been one of my favorite games, i can assert that if you enjoyed the core mechanics of ziggurat, you will almost certainly be vulnerable to being hooked by videoball.

videoball is all about you. everything is right there. the more you play, the more you see 2, 3, 4 moves ahead. there’s no limit but oneself, because there few-to-no artificial limitations. as spacetown alluded, there is no informational obfuscation. in fact, the game actually allows you to look at any given screenshot and extrapolate in reverse what happened in the seconds leading up to the snap. that’s a lot of information! and yet every piece of that information is critically vital. none can be excised without compromising the skill cap and learning experience that the game presents.

videoball is not easy to play well, despite being easy to play. shooting a basketball is not easy either. serving a tennis ball is really tough. many of the takes i’ve seen on this game basically lament that you just nudge balls around, it feels random, and then someone slams and it ricochets randomly and then someone scores, repeat and then someone wins. they don’t feel it. i mean, yeah. no one slams home runs (no pun intended) their first time at the plate. but i’m here to vigorously assert that after dozens of hours and hundreds of games, the game just never runs out of depth. the divide between you and your avatar continues to shrink, and the imposition of your will becomes more and more natural. you are nearly never fighting the game in videoball (you are very frequently fighting the game in rocket league, especially when first starting out); you are waging sport with your opponents.

so, again. it circles back to the depression this game’s relatively barren playerbase and muted outsider enthusiasm drives into my soul.

i sincerely apologize for my misanthropic bullshit in this thread. it’s not you, it’s me.

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3 levels of triangles. the fourth level (square) is permanent (does not charge further).[quote=“anothergod, post:185, topic:2181”]
What are the different properties of the different levels?
[/quote]

level 1s (L1s) are the fastest, smallest triangles. they do not need to be charged, although there is a brief cooldown after release before another can be fired. L1s will dissipate upon striking anything (be it a wall, a player, another triangle, a square, or the ball). they are most useful for tackling (striking another player with your projectile), canceling (striking another player’s projectile with your own, which causes both to dissipate), dribbling (striking the ball repeatedly to gain momentum and avoid the vulnerability of charging), and, perhaps most importantly, reversing (striking a slammed ball (indicated by the solid, thick tail trailing behind the ball) in order to alter its vector while maintaining or amplifying its speed).

level 2s are the “optimal” triangles. your bread and butter. you will spend most of your time in a typical game charging and firing L2 after L2. the ‘why’ of this assertion will become more clear in light of the properties of the other triangles. L2s do not dissipate upon striking a ball*. they do, however, dissipate when striking any other object in the game. L2s generate significantly more thrust on the ball than L1s. L2s can also “balance” on a ball and strike a ball repeatedly, causing the ball to cross long distances with a single projectile’s influence. a significant fundamental of the game is learning how to maximize L2 production. you want to get your timing tight enough that you can match or outpace other players’ production rate, lest you be continually pushed back. the act of two players trading L2s on one or more balls is called “dueling” by the community, and it is the backbone of every competitive videoball match. taking advantage of L2s’ property of being able to strike multiple balls is absolutely vital for advancing your level of play.

level 3s are large, slow-moving projectiles that cause any ball struck by them to “slam” at high speeds across the playing field. these triangles are flashy but dangerous, as even a lowly L1 can reverse the vector of a slammed ball, allowing players to punish you for your greed. like L1s, L3s dissipate upon striking any other object in the game, including balls. the projectiles are, however, large enough to strike two balls simultaneously, causing them both to go “supersonic” (community term).[quote=“anothergod, post:185, topic:2181”]
When do you want to drop blocks?
[/quote]

depends on who you ask. watch videos on my youtube channel, or play with me online. there are only two players who consistently use squares online (on steam): myself and Teodoro Fuentealba. personally, i think squares are incredibly useful for reneging on charged L3s, barricading the goal in 3v3s (where trying to fight for field space with your teammates can be highly detrimental), placing one behind a ball close to flush with a wall to clear it, and “holding” a square to deflect incoming shots. they are a suitable response to in-game lag, as well, so that’s worth keeping in mind.

*there are several exceptions to this rule, which are beyond the scope of this post

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rare wild @Rudie sightings


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@all_monsters in their natural habitat

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