Unreal Table Ball Devlog - June 2024

Hi all, thought I'd share some information regarding Unreal Table Ball (The new title for Table Ball)

Ball Go FAST

As the bumper hits the ball, I thought it'd make the game more fun and challenging to make the ball speed up each hit. So every time you hit the ball away from your goal, the ball gets 1.5 times faster, this should help make the game a little more fun then it has been.

Changes to difficulty settings

The only way in which the game was made harder/easier was by changing the speed of the games AI. Well I say"NO MORE", now the games base featureset will change based on your difficulty setting.

If you select "Easy" the AI bumper will shrink and be very very small, and the "speed up on bumper collision" mechanic will be disabled.

If you select "Normal" (or never change the setting), you'll have the Table Ball experience you know and love, plus the extra featureset being added in this version of the game.

However, if you select "Hard" the AI bumper will increase in size threefold, the AI's speed will severely increase, your speed will slow and the balls speed will be doubled each bumper hit, the game is being designed to actually have a substantial change based on difficulty, instead of just changing the speed of the player and AI.

(Ignore the debug value shown in the top-left, this is a slightly older screenshot)

I would LIKE to include a "Custom" difficulty setting, that'll allow you to tweak all values and enable/disable all features, for example, I want it to be possible to have everything enabled for the Hard Difficulty, while being allowed to disable the "Ball Speed Up" Mechanic, and I want you to be able to choose the size of each bumper.

AI - Chance of Radical Movement

The AI in the game can now randomly alter it's movement away from the ball, this is to decrease the chance of the right bumper basically being a God at the game. Currently the "float" cannot be changed and the right-bumper will ALWAYS have a 10% chance of randomly going off course.

There will be MANY more changes to the AI in this version of the game from the original game.

Beta when?

Well I've got the base game features mostly done, atm we've got a fairly functional REDACTED clone, but I don't feel comfortable releasing it, even in public beta, until I've added the base "Table Ball" game mode, so powerups and all. I will however be releasing access to a private beta over on my Discord server within the next few weeks, so be sure to join there if you'd like to participate.

---------------------------------------------- And that's all for today folks, I've got a LOT more work to do for Unreal Table Ball Simply what I'm calling Table Ball 3.0.0. I HOPE to have the public beta live sometime within the next few months, unfortunately I go away very soon and will be unable to work on the game. But I'll try to continue coming up with ideas and new concepts to make Table Ball much better in the long run.

Cya, Robin