Acorn Tennis

You and your neighbor are bored from quarantine, and are sitting in your yard in the fall.
In both of your yards, you have 1 matured oak tree. It drops acorns and leaves time to time.

You dread raking up the leaves and having the lawn mower fling acorns everywhere.

As an acorn falls before you, your old acorn tennis reflexes kick in, and you grab the nearby wooden racket, and whack it. To your surprise, it comes flying back!

You’re excited, but also worried. Your mom’s 2 minutes away, and when she comes home, you know she’s going to make you actually do work.

The least you can do is make your lawn look better than theirs

This is the first, first-person tennis game for the PC that is remotely playable. The closest competitor is First Person Tennis, which was built for VR.

With venturing into new territory, many difficulties were endured. I didn't know how to animate, so I had to go with procedural animation, to deal with all of the angles players can hit the ball at.

Then there was the issue of playability, because hitting  a small, fast moving ball is hard! That's when adding superpowers came in. Local time dilation was also pretty hard to implement, because it's usually done on a global scale.

Finally it was making an AI. The input was so complicated that doing it was difficult, and using tensorflow was out of the question given the long episode length (2 minutes) and physics interactions involved, as well as the numerous continuous inputs that are intertwined by command over local time dilation.

This game was built with multiplayer gameplay in mind. While it is outside the scope of this game jam, it may be something to look forward to.

Assets:

The skybox and leaves were drawn by Areeba.

The acorn model, ground model, and materials used were created by Yuuki, and textures were drawn from standard assets and Unity distributed, free assets.

The game's resources were selected such that monetization would not run into any issues from copyright - thus all content is either original or royalty free.