What is
Deathball?

Deathball is an arcade game that me and my friends are addicted to - it's like if Rocket League had a two-dimensional baby with an old-school arcade RPG. You play as a wizard and attempt to put a ball into the other wizard's net. The only problem is that it is a cabinet-only game so we have to go on-site and pay 50¢ to play.

This gave me the idea to create a "clone" of the game so that we could play when we aren't able or wanting to go out. Clone is in quotes because my version doesn't touch the insane visual and mechanical polish of the original, I can only hope that someone plays it and says "hey, that was kind of fun."

I built this game using Phaser 3, which is a JavaScript game framework. Originally I planned to develop the game in Unity, but I decided that it would be really inconvenient to have to download and install the game in order to play it. With Phaser I can give someone a link and they can play on any desktop device instantly without any setup. I like Phaser because it gives well-documented implementations for conventional game features like tilemaps, collision, scenes, etc. and since it is open-source if there is something about the API that I don't like I can just write something myself. It's also surprisingly performant for a web framework - with graphics acceleration enabled the game runs upwards of 200 fps on my machine.

One disadvantage of hosting the game on the web is that the only well-supported communication API is WebSocket, and WebSocket only supports TCP so the prospect of making Deathball a remote multiplayer experience isn't great. WebRTC allows peer-to-peer UDP connections and seems to be pretty supported these days, it is not supported in Internet Explorer but IE has been discontinued 🎉 so maybe that is a sign that I should add multiplayer. We shall see.

All credit goes to the original creator, Tony Hauber.