Tone Tennis

Built in response to a challenge from the (now defunct) Experimental Gameplay Project, Tone Tennis features 1-dimensional gameplay and is played with 5 buttons.

The twist was that the roundup games would then be played at the bottom of a swimming pool turned nightclub in Berlin, on 5 big physical buttons that players would need to jump on to activate.

It is a simple tennis game where players can use 5 buttons to exchange a ball between them, trying to score points by throwing the ball in the opposing player’s goal zone. During the “serve” process the ball goes through several speed cycles, slowing down with each cycle. This also has the effect of shrinking the active zones. A player can also try to “catch” a ball to reset the ball speed and active zone width and serve the ball again. A shared button in the middle allows players to smash the ball, speeding it up dramatically.

What I tried to accomplish with this is allowing a serving player to “choose his battlefield” in a way, favoring accuracy or speed to try to find his opponent’s “discomfort zone”. The hard part was tuning the gameplay, since I had no access to the real control scheme and all my tests were made on a keyboard’s 1 to 5 keys. So I set my variables on the assumption that the pads would be set in a way that one player can easily access 2 pads, but reaching a third pad (in this case, the “smash” pad) would imply a risk in case of failing to hit the ball since doing that means stepping away from the pad that would allow him to defend his goal zone.

Links:

• Final 5-Button games roundup
• Contest winners (with pictures!)

You can download sources and executables here. Creative Commons License

Uses GreenSock‘s TweenLite lib
Featuring the font D3 CuteBitMapism by Digital Dream Design
Sound generation method heavily inspired by Bit-101’s Tone class