Ball The Fuck Out

Ball The Fuck out is a first person melee based FPS game set in a far future death sport. Players use a baseball bat to fight enemies by bashing them into a balled up form before hitting them into other enemies in order to kill them and progress though the waves. We made the game because there was an interest within our team to make a physics heavy melee based first person game both to challenge our team and to push the game into a unique space as first person games with a melee only combat system working at this speed are scarce to see.

I was the lead systems designer for Ball The Fuck Out and was responsible for designing, communicating, implementing, and balancing a variety of the games core mechanics such as the functions of the bat and the enemies within the game. These systems were the core of our game as Ball the Fuck Out was an arcade like, game play first experience, where players would spend every second of play from the menu to the game over screen doing nothing but interacting with the games core set of combat mechanics. As a result It was critical that these systems felt interesting and engaging to keep players coming back to play the game. 

To ensure the quality of these systems I regularly brought the game to formal QA testing to receive feedback on every change we made on the game, allowing me to iterate the systems into their final forms. For example the batting started development as a much simpler system that would allow the player to swing the bat by tapping the left mouse button, this swing wasn't very engaging and served as a fix all within the game, in order to add depth we implemented a system that split swings between a light bump, performed by tapping the left mouse button, and a heavy swing, performed by holding and releasing the left mouse button. These swings both served different roles with the light bump turning the bear like "Teddy" enemies into their balled up form and the heavy swing launching both teddies and drones away from the player towards their crosshair. Testers then found that mashing the light swing would allow the player to effectively sweep away hordes of enemies, so a system for cooldowns on both the light and heavy swing was implemented. These changes along with a variety of minor tweaks to its feel and visual and sound effects for its impact have lead to the batting we have in the game today, and changes like this were brought to systems all throughout the project.

In the process of working on this game I worked with both other designers, programmers, artists, sound designers, and business students on a team of 8 which helped me develop my skills working across disciplines on a game project. The game was developed over the course of a semester in college and though we ultimately didn't continue the project into another semester, we are very happy with the results and the experience gained working on the project.