Thunderballs release on Friday, October 30th
Yes, it's actually happening. Thunderballs will be released - for free! - on Friday. Get ready to rumble!
Join the Discord: http://discord.gg/hyQRe6v
Join the Discord: http://discord.gg/hyQRe6v
Thunderballs News
Dev update
Hello future Thunderballers! It's been radio silence from us for a few months since GDC. But rest assured, Thunderballs is still rolling forward like those ominous dark clouds on the horizon. We have been heads-down polishing the game with some of the feedback we got at GDC, and conquering some exciting new Unity bugs :)
We have just updated our expected public release to Q4 2019. The rest of the summer, we will be focused on getting a build through alpha testing, so expect some news in early fall about our release plans and more details on our pre-release first access.
We can't wait to get everyone blowing up pylons and chunking up enemy bases, so thanks for bearing with us... Stay tuned!
We have just updated our expected public release to Q4 2019. The rest of the summer, we will be focused on getting a build through alpha testing, so expect some news in early fall about our release plans and more details on our pre-release first access.
We can't wait to get everyone blowing up pylons and chunking up enemy bases, so thanks for bearing with us... Stay tuned!
Thunderballs VR - Dev Blog #4 - Pylon Powers
After GDC 2018, Thunderballs grew from a little prototype project to something much bigger. We knew that if we were actually going to release it, we would need some help from outside our core team. We kept working with CJ on the designs of the weapons and avatars, while pulling in a few more talented (and very patient) contractors specializing in sound effects, PR/marketing, graphic design and branding.
Meanwhile, the three of us realized that while we had some fun weapon and destruction mechanics, we still didn’t have a real game yet. How should you win a game of Thunderballs? Maybe you pummel the other team’s base and once you reach some threshold of destruction, you win? Or, maybe you need to take out a key part of the base. We started including a power orb - a macguffin, really - that you needed to defend. Win by taking out the other team’s orb.
The single orb win-condition felt like we were on the right track, but it was too simple and games were too quick. We experimented by putting the orb in a destructible shell that would require more time and effort to break through, hiding the orb from the other team in a randomly selected shell to introduce a three-card monte element of luck and discovery, and so on. Ultimately we decided that just having more orbs scattered around made sense. We could control the length of the game with the number of orbs, and distributing the orbs around the bases gave you multiple targets in different places to shoot at and defend.
Still, something was missing. The game felt too flat when it was just about shooting the other team’s orbs faster than they could shoot yours. And you could end up trapped in offense-defense standoffs, with one team shooting cannons and mortars at the pylons, the other team defending, and each one just waiting for the other to make a mistake. We debated how to inject more strategy and tactical dimensions, and pretty quickly came up with a few new ideas. Our past work on Midnight Madness was all about activating physical spaces and getting people running around NYC solving puzzles, so we tried to apply some of that thinking to the virtual playspace of Thunderballs.
First, we rethought the orbs themselves, turning them into energy pylons. We wanted each pylon to give you a different type of ammo for your handgun if you approached and charged off of it for a few seconds. To design the new ammo types, we created a spreadsheet that let us easily experiment with different combinations of projectile physics and damage parameters. We played all types of combinations of gravity, speed, drag, size, lifespan, and damage to players, walls, pylons, pillars, and so on. Most of those early experiments evolved into the six ammos we have in-game now, which we lovingly refer to as the sniper, the shotgun, the lobber, the drill, the middleman, and the basic. (Bonus fact: the only ammo that didn’t make the cut was the negative-gravity reverso)
[Evolution of the pylon design]
Introducing the ammo types completely changed the game. Obviously, you could do a lot more with the new ammos themselves. But now, you also had a reason to move around the entirety of the base. And you had to be more thoughtful and responsive in which enemy pylons you targeted first, since you could selectively cripple the opponents’ abilities by taking out specific pylons.
Then we added yet another dimension - invasion - by creating a bridge between the two bases. You could now blow a hole and sneak into the other team’s base to destroy their pylons by charging off of them. Invasion and overcharging meant you had a whole new tool in the toolkit for winning, and also upped the adrenaline level with some direct ground-level combat.
With all these new mechanics in the mix, we knew we had the ingredients to make Thunderballs a lot of fun, and more than just a plain old shooter. But like any good recipe, it’s all about the proportions. We didn’t want any single weapon or strategy to be too dominant or too weak. So we tweaked the damage parameters of the weapons, and slowed down invasion with barricades on the bridge, requiring players to make an investment up-front in clearing a path to the other side.
With all the new gameplay elements, and the contractors starting to deliver amazing sound effects, promotional artwork, and new models and textures, we could finally see the pieces of the Thunderballs puzzle coming together. But, we knew we still had a lot to do. I’m reminded of a sign on interstate highway 70 as you get close to Denver from the mountains - Truckers, don’t be fooled, you are not down yet! Indeed, the Thunderballs truck still had a long road ahead.
Meanwhile, the three of us realized that while we had some fun weapon and destruction mechanics, we still didn’t have a real game yet. How should you win a game of Thunderballs? Maybe you pummel the other team’s base and once you reach some threshold of destruction, you win? Or, maybe you need to take out a key part of the base. We started including a power orb - a macguffin, really - that you needed to defend. Win by taking out the other team’s orb.
The single orb win-condition felt like we were on the right track, but it was too simple and games were too quick. We experimented by putting the orb in a destructible shell that would require more time and effort to break through, hiding the orb from the other team in a randomly selected shell to introduce a three-card monte element of luck and discovery, and so on. Ultimately we decided that just having more orbs scattered around made sense. We could control the length of the game with the number of orbs, and distributing the orbs around the bases gave you multiple targets in different places to shoot at and defend.
Still, something was missing. The game felt too flat when it was just about shooting the other team’s orbs faster than they could shoot yours. And you could end up trapped in offense-defense standoffs, with one team shooting cannons and mortars at the pylons, the other team defending, and each one just waiting for the other to make a mistake. We debated how to inject more strategy and tactical dimensions, and pretty quickly came up with a few new ideas. Our past work on Midnight Madness was all about activating physical spaces and getting people running around NYC solving puzzles, so we tried to apply some of that thinking to the virtual playspace of Thunderballs.
First, we rethought the orbs themselves, turning them into energy pylons. We wanted each pylon to give you a different type of ammo for your handgun if you approached and charged off of it for a few seconds. To design the new ammo types, we created a spreadsheet that let us easily experiment with different combinations of projectile physics and damage parameters. We played all types of combinations of gravity, speed, drag, size, lifespan, and damage to players, walls, pylons, pillars, and so on. Most of those early experiments evolved into the six ammos we have in-game now, which we lovingly refer to as the sniper, the shotgun, the lobber, the drill, the middleman, and the basic. (Bonus fact: the only ammo that didn’t make the cut was the negative-gravity reverso)
[Evolution of the pylon design]
Introducing the ammo types completely changed the game. Obviously, you could do a lot more with the new ammos themselves. But now, you also had a reason to move around the entirety of the base. And you had to be more thoughtful and responsive in which enemy pylons you targeted first, since you could selectively cripple the opponents’ abilities by taking out specific pylons.
Then we added yet another dimension - invasion - by creating a bridge between the two bases. You could now blow a hole and sneak into the other team’s base to destroy their pylons by charging off of them. Invasion and overcharging meant you had a whole new tool in the toolkit for winning, and also upped the adrenaline level with some direct ground-level combat.
With all these new mechanics in the mix, we knew we had the ingredients to make Thunderballs a lot of fun, and more than just a plain old shooter. But like any good recipe, it’s all about the proportions. We didn’t want any single weapon or strategy to be too dominant or too weak. So we tweaked the damage parameters of the weapons, and slowed down invasion with barricades on the bridge, requiring players to make an investment up-front in clearing a path to the other side.
With all the new gameplay elements, and the contractors starting to deliver amazing sound effects, promotional artwork, and new models and textures, we could finally see the pieces of the Thunderballs puzzle coming together. But, we knew we still had a lot to do. I’m reminded of a sign on interstate highway 70 as you get close to Denver from the mountains - Truckers, don’t be fooled, you are not down yet! Indeed, the Thunderballs truck still had a long road ahead.
Thunderballs VR - Dev Blog #3 - Doubling Down
Here’s a little secret - we never thought we would actually release Thunderballs. Initially, we thought we would spend a few months learning the tools, making something cool, and then use it to get support for a larger project. It was early 2018 and we were still learning about the changing realities of the VR entertainment market (we still are!). We thought that with a prototype game we may be able to pitch a hardware manufacturer, game publisher, or IP holder on a bigger project.
We signed up to attend GDC 2018 with the plan to show off the project in its nascent state, and see what connections we could make. None of us had been to GDC before but we knew that, worst case, we would learn a ton about the industry and get to see some cool games.
We agreed we wanted to add a bit of polish to the prototype before GDC, and decided on creating proper models and textures for the three weapons. We rang up our friend CJ, who had contributed artwork to Endgame, and started working with him on the visual concepts for the mortar, cannon, and handgun.
Designing the weapons was the first time we had to make some decisions about the overall aesthetic of the game. I’d like to say we had some super tight, cohesive art direction at the beginning, but we absolutely did not. We liked the semi-realistic destruction of things blowing into physical chunks, and we liked smoke and fire effects. That led us towards a realistic look for the weapons themselves. Metal, mechanical, dirty, but with some anachronistic elements thrown in.
We liked the concept of future-primitive, mixing of the historically familiar with the future fantastical. And conveniently this flexible aesthetic approach seemed to give us a lot of freedom when it came to other decisions, like picking a heavy metal branding and a spaghetti western soundtrack.
By the time GDC came around, we had one weapon done - the cannon. We did a quick capture of a play session from the hotel, cut the footage in Premiere, and within a few hours had a trailer for our work-in-progress game that still had no title. With the trailer on an iPad, we hit the GDC expo halls and showed it to anyone we could.
[Stills from our GDC 2018 trailer]
The trailer, however rough, was a big asset in our conversations with folks like Brandon with Windows Mixed Reality and Rita with the Oculus Start program. Both of them were kind enough to invite us in their indie developer programs. However, as we had more conversations with industry insiders, we learned that the days of cash floating around for indie VR developers was over. The hardware manufacturers still wanted to seed the content market, but they had refocused their support to bigger name developers and titles with familiar characters and IP.
It was looking less likely that we were going to get anywhere with a half-finished game. In the wake of GDC, we realized that our best option was to develop the prototype concept into a finished product and see the game through to a public release.
So, we decided to double down on Thunderballs. We knew that, even if the final product would be relatively simple, we still had a ton of work to do. The core mechanics needed refining, there was lot of basic infrastructure missing, like matchmaking, we needed to find some help in the graphic design and PR/marketing realms… And, oh yeah, we still hadn’t decided how you actually win a game of Thunderballs.
We signed up to attend GDC 2018 with the plan to show off the project in its nascent state, and see what connections we could make. None of us had been to GDC before but we knew that, worst case, we would learn a ton about the industry and get to see some cool games.
We agreed we wanted to add a bit of polish to the prototype before GDC, and decided on creating proper models and textures for the three weapons. We rang up our friend CJ, who had contributed artwork to Endgame, and started working with him on the visual concepts for the mortar, cannon, and handgun.
Designing the weapons was the first time we had to make some decisions about the overall aesthetic of the game. I’d like to say we had some super tight, cohesive art direction at the beginning, but we absolutely did not. We liked the semi-realistic destruction of things blowing into physical chunks, and we liked smoke and fire effects. That led us towards a realistic look for the weapons themselves. Metal, mechanical, dirty, but with some anachronistic elements thrown in.
We liked the concept of future-primitive, mixing of the historically familiar with the future fantastical. And conveniently this flexible aesthetic approach seemed to give us a lot of freedom when it came to other decisions, like picking a heavy metal branding and a spaghetti western soundtrack.
By the time GDC came around, we had one weapon done - the cannon. We did a quick capture of a play session from the hotel, cut the footage in Premiere, and within a few hours had a trailer for our work-in-progress game that still had no title. With the trailer on an iPad, we hit the GDC expo halls and showed it to anyone we could.
[Stills from our GDC 2018 trailer]
The trailer, however rough, was a big asset in our conversations with folks like Brandon with Windows Mixed Reality and Rita with the Oculus Start program. Both of them were kind enough to invite us in their indie developer programs. However, as we had more conversations with industry insiders, we learned that the days of cash floating around for indie VR developers was over. The hardware manufacturers still wanted to seed the content market, but they had refocused their support to bigger name developers and titles with familiar characters and IP.
It was looking less likely that we were going to get anywhere with a half-finished game. In the wake of GDC, we realized that our best option was to develop the prototype concept into a finished product and see the game through to a public release.
So, we decided to double down on Thunderballs. We knew that, even if the final product would be relatively simple, we still had a ton of work to do. The core mechanics needed refining, there was lot of basic infrastructure missing, like matchmaking, we needed to find some help in the graphic design and PR/marketing realms… And, oh yeah, we still hadn’t decided how you actually win a game of Thunderballs.
Thunderballs VR - Dev Blog #2 - Friends and Physics
What kind of VR game do we want to make? It was now late 2017, and this was the first question the three of us asked ourselves as we kicked off developing the game that would eventually become Thunderballs. Would this be a narrative-heavy adventure? A sensory-overload acid-trip world to explore? A brainy puzzle challenge in line with our past projects like Midnight Madness and Endgame?
Since all three of us were still pretty new to VR, we spent a week (OK, a few weeks :) playing a ton of games to get a sense of what was out there. What games seemed to make the best use of VR as a unique, immersive, interactive, multi-sensory medium? Some games wowed us initially with killer graphics, rich environments, or clever mechanics, but we found that we didn’t always want to go back and play those games again a second time.
For the first and perhaps only time in Megafauna history, all three of us agreed: the coolest elements of the VR games we played were friends and physics. Friends because playing a collaborative game together, like a Rec Room quest or Star Trek, was always more fun than going into a single-player experience.
And physics because of how intense and satisfying it is in VR to have objects whizzing by your head, exploding all around you, and launching away from you. We decided early on that, kind of like how everything in Willy Wonka’s lab was edible, we wanted everything around you to be destructible. Walls, floors, obstacles, and of course, the other players.
[The drill weapon chunking up a wall in a recent version of the game]
So, friends and physics would be the core elements of our game. We would only learn later that making a multiplayer, lag-sensitive, physics-based VR game with tens of thousands of destructible objects was maybe the hardest thing we possibly could have chosen as our first project, but hey...hindsight is always 20/20.
With our fresh Unity subscriptions in place, we started prototyping and playtesting extremely simple multiplayer games. The one we liked the best was just two players on floating platforms firing white marshmallow projectiles at one another. Beat your opponent by destroying their platform before they destroy yours. That super simple concept was enough fun that we decided to make it the foundation of the game.
The first thing we realized is that we needed some mechanics other than just shooting a handheld gun, as fun as that may be. We did rough prototypes of two additional "fixed" weapons. First, a cannon, that could do more damage than the handheld. We tried putting a chair on the cannon so you actually move with the barrel as you aim. This made absolutely no sense, but it was fun, so we kept it. (Although we quickly learned that having the VR player rotate with the barrel made you sick, but moving the player position only did not). Having the chair also let the player feel the recoil as the cannon barrel kicks back on fire - subtle, but cool.
[The final cannon design]
We then added a third weapon, a catapult, that would later become the mortar. The catapult would be the hardest to aim, but also do the most damage of the three weapons. We quickly realized that the fun of the catapult was really limited by not being able to see the impact. So we added a floating monitor and tracking camera that follows the projectile. Again, this made absolutely no sense if we were trying to be realistic, but it was so fun that we agreed we had to keep it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOcCri3NVv0
[The demo video of the early weapon prototypes]
We also liked the options we now had between the handgun, cannon, and catapult and their different balances of damage vs. accuracy vs. mobility. With these three weapons prototyped, and a few stock sound effects thrown in, we were already hooked on the concept. Thunderballs was on its way....
Since all three of us were still pretty new to VR, we spent a week (OK, a few weeks :) playing a ton of games to get a sense of what was out there. What games seemed to make the best use of VR as a unique, immersive, interactive, multi-sensory medium? Some games wowed us initially with killer graphics, rich environments, or clever mechanics, but we found that we didn’t always want to go back and play those games again a second time.
For the first and perhaps only time in Megafauna history, all three of us agreed: the coolest elements of the VR games we played were friends and physics. Friends because playing a collaborative game together, like a Rec Room quest or Star Trek, was always more fun than going into a single-player experience.
And physics because of how intense and satisfying it is in VR to have objects whizzing by your head, exploding all around you, and launching away from you. We decided early on that, kind of like how everything in Willy Wonka’s lab was edible, we wanted everything around you to be destructible. Walls, floors, obstacles, and of course, the other players.
[The drill weapon chunking up a wall in a recent version of the game]
So, friends and physics would be the core elements of our game. We would only learn later that making a multiplayer, lag-sensitive, physics-based VR game with tens of thousands of destructible objects was maybe the hardest thing we possibly could have chosen as our first project, but hey...hindsight is always 20/20.
With our fresh Unity subscriptions in place, we started prototyping and playtesting extremely simple multiplayer games. The one we liked the best was just two players on floating platforms firing white marshmallow projectiles at one another. Beat your opponent by destroying their platform before they destroy yours. That super simple concept was enough fun that we decided to make it the foundation of the game.
The first thing we realized is that we needed some mechanics other than just shooting a handheld gun, as fun as that may be. We did rough prototypes of two additional "fixed" weapons. First, a cannon, that could do more damage than the handheld. We tried putting a chair on the cannon so you actually move with the barrel as you aim. This made absolutely no sense, but it was fun, so we kept it. (Although we quickly learned that having the VR player rotate with the barrel made you sick, but moving the player position only did not). Having the chair also let the player feel the recoil as the cannon barrel kicks back on fire - subtle, but cool.
[The final cannon design]
We then added a third weapon, a catapult, that would later become the mortar. The catapult would be the hardest to aim, but also do the most damage of the three weapons. We quickly realized that the fun of the catapult was really limited by not being able to see the impact. So we added a floating monitor and tracking camera that follows the projectile. Again, this made absolutely no sense if we were trying to be realistic, but it was so fun that we agreed we had to keep it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOcCri3NVv0
[The demo video of the early weapon prototypes]
We also liked the options we now had between the handgun, cannon, and catapult and their different balances of damage vs. accuracy vs. mobility. With these three weapons prototyped, and a few stock sound effects thrown in, we were already hooked on the concept. Thunderballs was on its way....