[iOS] Table Tennis Touch

[JordanYakuto]

Hi everybody!

I’d like to introduce you to our [pre-release] title, Table Tennis Touch, for iOS (Android to follow shortly).

Today we just launched our first Teaser for the game to Vimeo, you can watch it on our teaser site:

Table Tennis Touch - the most advanced table tennis game for iOS

This will hopefully whet your appetite, then the full Trailer (with lots of gameplay) will appear this Friday (April 18th)

The game features a variety of events, from tournaments, leagues and knockouts, to one-on-one throwdown challenges and exciting mini games - including Little House where you have to serve the ball past a barrage of little men into the house, or Squares where you have to keep the ball in play on tiny little sections of table tennis tables! We have a full career mode, Game Center integration, fully 3D graphics with detailed physics and AI to boot. Plus our star of the show (and your resident Table Tennis coach), WiffWaff!

Some Background:
Although I’m using this new account to post about the game, I actually started the initial prototypes for the game (and lots of messing around with Unity!) almost 5 years ago (wow, time has flown by!), when the forums were a much smaller place. Unity has been an incredible platform to work in, and it’s astonishing to see how much it’s grown in that time. Within the last 2 years, development of the game (alongside my business partner James Gratton) got serious, and after many many man-hours of relentless dev work, we’re very proud to have our little product!

If you like the look of our stuff, you can stay tuned for the latest screengrabs, videos and of course the all important release date:

Facebook: Redirecting...
Twitter: x.com

or follow me, Jordan Kirk, personally (I’ve been a bit backwards on social networking up until now, but I’m learning!): x.com

Finally, here’s a screenshot of a match in action.

And let me introduce you to WiffWaff:

Thanks,
Jordan

[JordanYakuto]

It’s been a busy day trying to get going on our social channels, but we reached our first “mini milestone” of 100 views of our Teaser video, which we’re very grateful for!

Don’t forget the full trailer this Friday 18th April.

Night!

[JordanYakuto]

Another good day of Teaser views. If you haven’t seen it yet, check it out at:

Table Tennis Touch - the most advanced table tennis game for iOS

I should be putting up some of our early concept sketches tomorrow, but in the mean time, here’s a latest piece of promo art.

Check more out at x.com

[JordanYakuto]

Think it’s time for a sneaky treat for the Unity forum peeps.

So, here’s an exclusive screenshot of one of the Mini Games from Table Tennis Touch - this one is called “Little House”.

Use your best serve to spin the ball off the wall and into the little house before the time runs out

[joni.giuro]

Why hasn’t anyone commented on this yet? It’s Awesome! This is exactly what I want to see from the unity community. Polished, completely finished, and well done teasers and assets. I can’t say anything about the gameplay but if it’s on the level of what I’ve seen in the trailer I’m sure it’s going to be great. I’m not a fan of table tennis myself but I’m definitely going to download this. Great job.

[JordanYakuto]

Hi Joni - thankyou for the kind words! We’re at a very exciting stage with the project. The full trailer releases this Friday, and we can’t wait for people to see the gameplay in action then.

Be sure to stay tuned to us on Twitter and Facebook, and of course right here where we’ll be showing off some of our notes/artwork and screenshots of the assets inside Unity. After 2 years of development, there’s plenty of stuff we can share!

Also, if anybody has any questions about any aspect of the game, feel free to leave them here or drop us a PM.

Thanks again,
Jordan

Web: www.tabletennistouch.com
Facebook: Redirecting...
Twitter: x.com

or follow our individual accounts:
Jordan Kirk: x.com (artwork and all things pixel-based)
James Gratton: x.com (coding wizardry)

[casperjeff]

Very nice pre-trailer.
Some of the game modes look awesome.
Can’t wait for the REAL trailer friday…

[JordanYakuto]

Just been looking back through the first (and main) folder of notes (there were many more additional pages ripped out of other notebooks and kept alongside it). Crazy to think though that it represents 2 years of stuff that just fell out of your head.

…and that’s just the design side of things from me, it doesn’t include any of James’ coding plans!

Here’s a picture that shows the main notebook, some sketches of WiffWaff and how he shoots balls from his mouth, plus two (of MANY!) pages of planning for tournament/league structures. I remember it being so hard to come up with a consistent way of styling and displaying the multiple possibilities of tournament sheet layouts that we were experimenting with. In the end, we focused on a clear way to handle straight knockout tournaments, round-robin leagues, and larger tournaments with group stages at the start.

[JordanYakuto]

thankyou Casper, glad you liked the teaser!

we just posted this tonight on FB Twitter:

[JordanYakuto]

I’ll end my posts for the night with what I think was one of the key lessons from the whole project actually (certainly from my perspective)

Build everything higher res than you think you need.

Technology moves so quickly, in fact, that when we started the (what we thought would be a 6-10mth) project, hardware was less powerful, screen resolutions were lower, and even gamers expectations on mobile platform apps was lower.

The tech accelerates past you at an alarming rate, entirely new devices come along that make you re-evaluate your strategy, and you don’t want to end up having to re-model/texture all your assets. Build them “high def” (you can always use these for your animatics and promo art), then reduce to suit (I build my low res assets and proxies by hand, but you could always use one of numerous decimation tools).

[Meltdown]

Great work, I’d like to see more of this quality in the Showcase section!

Those screenshots look great, are they in-game screenshots on iOS?
What shader did you use for the shiny floor?

[JordanYakuto]

Thanks Meltdown,

Yep, those stills are indeed the iOS screenshots. I’ll post a picture tomorrow of the Unity editor so you can see how things look.

The floor, believe it or not, is “old school” (a nod to my previous post about the tech accelerating past you!), in that we used semi-transparent maps for the floors and a mirrored copy of the world underneath (built as a slight proxy to make it as light as possible). We toyed with more complex shaders in places, but for a really shiny floor like the one in the Dance Studio (which you’re seeing in that screen grab), it was more than sufficient. When you’re in that particular environment, after you change ends (following somebody winning one game/set), you’d see we also then have a mirrored wall, which introduced more complexity, as we had to mirror the game of table tennis that you’re playing!! It all worked out ok in the end though (that’s my casual way of saying James did a mountain of work to implement something that fit my aesthetic demands!).

In fact, you’ll see that mirrored wall in the full trailer! Waaah, spoiler alert!

[Meltdown]

Very clever idea for the mirrored copy of the world for the shiny floor, never thought about that!

[joni.giuro]

James did a great job

[JordanYakuto]

We’re getting ever closer to the full trailer being unveiled to the world!

[JordanYakuto]

Hopefully this image will come out big enough to see (otherwise right-click and show it in a new tab to see it larger), but here’s a quick glimpse at one of the environments in the Unity editor

[JordanYakuto]

I’m sure you all find it similar looking back, but it still shocks me to revisit the incredible amount of stuff you obsess over on a game dev project.

Here’s a page of design notes/ideas just around what the shape and layout of the lozenges would be on the tournament sheets to hold the names of the players!

[Tony-West]

Looking great and really high production standards. Really looking forward to this coming out. Good luck.

[JordanYakuto]

Many thanks Tony, it’s great to hear positive feedback from the Unity Forum community!

[JordanYakuto]

WiffWaff’s getting a good night’s rest, it’s a big day for him tomorrow!