Making a web app
BALLKICK.ONLINE
I am nothing if not a man who adores his division 6 Sunday league indoor soccer team. The dizzying highs and terrifying lows of this weekly 40 minute event make me feel so alive. So you can understand my disappointment when I broke two toes on my left foot in a freak Muay Thai accident halfway through 2026.
I decided with all this time spent immobile it was time to start a new project. I decided on a simultaneous turn based mobile game based on the beautiful sport I love so much.
The game had a pretty tight scope from the beginning. It needed to be fast, comical, intuitive, fun (obviously) but it also needed to work with the limitations of mobile/browser based gaming. Latency, lag and low framerate were huge considerations when developing the game. All of the art, sounds, and music were created by me - I used Godot as my engine and Codex as my developer.
- Time
- Ongoing
- Role
- Everything
- Team size
- 1 man out of his depth
Gameplay loop
It’s all about passing
The goal (pun intended) is simple, get your players into position, and try to set up a chain to get around the enemy team and into their goal.
Players with possession can run, kick, pass and slide into the ball. Each character has a run path with nodes, these act as a timeline for when the turn is executed. Ghost previews show the players’ movements and the ball’s path.
The team without possession has to try and read where they think the ball will be.
The game is designed to be mostly played online against other players, complete with competitive ranked matches and ELO!
Emotes
Salt and BM are all part of the gaming experience
Didn’t take long into playing with a few friends before deciding - yep, this game needs emotes.
Keeping to the hand drawn theme, each emote has a unique sound that plays when activating, appearing under each player’s username so we know who sent what.
Map design
Same game, multiple fields
If variety is the spice of life then surely multiple map/fields are the condiments of novelty?
Maps don’t affect gameplay in any way, but they do make each game feel a bit more unique.
Big goal = Big celebration
And a cute referee!
Here we see the player not only land a tackle, but manage to convert that into a goal.
Each goal is complete with music, crowd chanting and stomping as well as persistent confetti (stays on the field the full match).
The confetti used is unique to the team colour.
See the little ref slide in and blow his whistle for kickoff? Love that guy.
Menus and end screens
You win
Keeping up with the scribbly, childlike illustration style of the game - all fonts used in the game are used to reflect that.
Music and sounds
16-bit madness
All sounds and music in the game were sourced and created by me. I relied heavily on the free jambox/DAW “BeepBox”.
Knowing full well most people will probably mute the music as it’s a mobile game I decided to get a bit crazy with it, big fan of the music from the New Super Mario bros games, and wanted to create something fun but silly and self aware.
So lots of vibrato and 16th note hi-hats were used, the music shown is the music that plays when searching for a match online.
I’m a seasoned digital designer living in Brisbane, Australia.
Electric guitar, futsal, my cat — happy to talk about any of these at length.
Let’s work together to make something nice.