The Art of Ragball

With this project, we really hit the ground running. Ryan had the original pitch, "Basketball, but the players are the balls. Also, ragdolls." From there, the original idea for Ragball was born. Originally called BuddyBall, the original team of 6 people worked together to establish the original vision for what we would turn into Ragball.

Our orginal concept was centered entirely around the existence of ragdoll physics. We knew that we wanted to create a basketball-esque game that incorporated this feature. From the name, the idea for the design of our characters began to emerge. The characters went through a few iterations, before we decided on the lovable oafs that you can see in the game today.

After solidifying our concept for our characters, we had to design the environment. While originally based off of a basketball court, it quickly became apparent that this wasn't visually interesting, nor conducive to gameplay. Playing off of the toy idea, we decided to utilize models that represented different toys and playthings that a child might use to create their own 'court'. We had a lot of fun with this, and after a few iterations, the final version of the cardboard court was created!