+++
title = "Ballpark"
date = 2022-03-01
authors = ["Aron Petau"]
description = "A 3D Game Concept in Unity"

[taxonomies]
tags = [
  "3D graphics",
  "Unity",
  "C#",
  "cyberpunk",
  "collaborative",
  "game",
  "physics",
  "communication",
  "1st person",
  "3rd person",
  "2 player",
  "university of osnabrück"
]
[extra]
banner =  "/images/ballpark_menu.png"

show_copyright = true
show_shares = true
+++

## Ballpark: 3D Environments in Unity

Implemented in Unity, Ballpark is a Concept work for a collaborative 2-Player Game, where one player is a navigator with a third-person perspective and another player is a copilot, responsible for interaction with the environment – featuring mostly working physics, intelligent enemies, a gun, a grappling hook system for traversing the map, a 2D Interface for navigation and a health bar system. On top of the meanest cyberpunk vibes my past self was able to conjure.

Enjoy!

{{ youtube(id="jwQWd9NPEIs") }}

As you can see, the design faces some questionable choices, but all mechanics are homemade from the ground up and I learned a lot. I often struggle to enjoy competitive games and think there is potential in a co-dependent game interface. During early testing, we often found that it enforces player communication since already the tutorial is quite hard to beat.
Due to me being a leftie, perhaps not entirely smart, I gave player one the keyboard arrows to work with and player two the WASD keys and left and right mouse buttons for grappling and shooting. For the game, it has an interesting side effect, in that players are forced not only to interact through the differing information on each player's screen but also have to physically interact and coordinate the controls.

As you can perhaps see, the ball-rolling navigation is quite hard to use.
It is a purely physics-based system, where, depending on the materiality of the ball, its weight, and therefore its inertia will drastically change.

On small screens, the prototype version of the game is virtually impossible to control and several visual bugs within the viewport still obfuscate items when they are too close. Considering that virtually all the mechanics are written from scratch, with a follow-me camera, collision detection, smart moving agents, and a still very wonky-looking grappling gun, I still think it deserves a spot in this portfolio.
For this project I focused completely on the mechanics of the game, resulting in lots of used prefabs and readymade 3D Objects. Next time, I want to do that myself too.

I enjoyed my stint into Unity a lot and am looking forward to creating my first VR application and would love to try out some form of mechanics where the user vision is completely obfuscated by VR and they have to carry their eyes as a handheld connected camera so that the players can move around the camera itself with their hands.
