Spiritual Volleyball

I was trying to work on Night Rider, but unfortunately I'm cursed by a secret group of Cupertino-based warlocks: every time I start a new SwiftUI project, I need to spend hours fixing Xcode. It was still worth the hassle, not just because I finally succeeded, but because I stumbled upon a small project I completely forgot about. After all, it is about the journey, thank you Ursula!

Spiritual Volleyball has neither end nor purpose. It's just two ghosts playing volleyball. Set in a picturesque beach scenery, with palm trees, little crosses and the classic By the Seaside (composed by no one other than Tim Apple) playing in the distance.

Note the bug where the net is too short and both players end up on the same side of the screen.

Why I made it

Three reasons: toys, side-hugs, and abandonware

New Toys

A few years back, Unity Engine released the first version of their post-processing pipeline. Suddenly adding effects like chromatic aberration, grain, colour grading became trivial. I had some doodles I wanted to turn into a game and thought I could make them look better with little effort.

Hugs

Testing any UI on the screen, vs. holding a physical object in your hand can result in completely different kinds of interactions. For instance, consider its shape, weight, or texture. Consider the distance between your eyes and the screen. Originally, the multiplayer mode of the game wasn't meant to be played on a computer screen, but on a phone.

The mobile UI was arranged in a way that the jump and move controls were placed on the opposite sides of the phone. This way the most comfortable way to play the game was a side-hug!

This didn't work out for a variety of reasons (phone screen size, input margin of error). I found another proof that trying to be creative when coming up with input systems generally backfires. And that's a good thing! My first "walking sim": How to Run an All-hands Meeting was inspired by what I'd learned here and uses terrible user input controls as a game mechanic.

Abandonware

At the time I was thinking about a series of smaller playthings, inspired by old NES games (think Spiritual Motocross - the modern interpretation of Excitebike, Hyper Olympic, or Spiritual Wrestling!).

Download

In order to download the game, you'll need to catch the marquee mouse:

🐁.               haha you'll never get mee

or just click here
The binary is not signed so you'd have to right click to open it.

Here are some games I actually finished and published:

Thanks for reading, see you tomorrow!

P.S. It seems that wikiHow has not just 1 but 4 ways of reversing curses, I think I might give it a go and 10x my SwiftUI skills.

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a giant foot-shaped snail with a house on its back. the house is still in construction, with a big crane towering above it The image is a stylized black-and-white illustration. In the lower left corner, there is a small, cozy-looking house with smoke rising from its chimney. The smoke, however, does not dissipate into the air but instead forms a dark, looming cloud. Within the cloud, the silhouette of a large, menacing face is visible, with its eyes and nose peeking through the darkness. The creature, perhaps a cat, appears to be watching over the house ominously, creating a sense of foreboding or unease.