We heard your suffering

The game has been out for more than a year, and we had time to analyze videos of people playing it. We realized there were two huge pain points:

• It is very hard to control the ball with the body of a squid
• Our AI is a bit too skilled at the game

Make squids bouncy again

For the first issue, we tried a bunch of solutions and decided to mix them together:

• Squids now have a bigger collider
• We now add some upwards and forwards forces to the ball when a squid touches it with its body
• There is a small vaccuum effect centered around each squid to slowly attract the ball

This will avoid the number one mistake we noticed players were doing, being a bit too far away from the ball when it is above them, and letting it fall just in front of them.

Dumb down the AI

We heard you. We know we messed up. It was not fair to publish a game with this AI. To be quite frank, I was so happy when I found out my AI code was unbeatable that I did not want to make it more fair because it would have harmed my ego. After a year of introspective thinking and meditation, I understood something very important: selling a game is not about my ego, it is about making players happy! And let's face it, no one likes to be endlessly crushed by a machine.

We knew we needed the AI to be gentler, but we had no idea how to do it. We did not want it to be stupid and we still wanted players to experience a challenge. The issue is that players do not have the same level and skills. We therefore needed an adaptive AI. After several minutes of intense brainstorming, we had the best idea we could have had in several minutes of intense brainstorming: we needed to introduce "glitches" in our AI! That way, it would sometimes do something incredibly stupid, but would still be able to try and correct its mistake.

How do you implement a glitch in a game? In my career I have had my shares of strange bugs, and the worst kind are the ones that only happen once in every X tries. That is how we designed it: every millisecond, the AI has a small chance of disconnecting its brain for a small duration. The higher the player score is compared to the AI, the smaller the chances of this glitch happening, and the glitch duration is higher when the AI has a higher score than the player.

This means that if the AI has 10 points and you have 3, you will essentially be playing versus a vegetable. It may even fail to serve the ball. If you have 10 points and the AI has 3, you will be playing versus the god of volleyball and will most probably be heavily humiliated.

As per usual, we changed a lot of things in order to make the gameplay more interesting. Most of these changes were thought by our main (and only) contributor, Le Jo (thanks man):

• Prevented players from bumping after a smash: this does not seem like much but it means that smashing the ball will not  be safe anymore: any counter will be fatal.
  
• Shortened the time where the ball is off limit.
  
• Accelerated the game by 16%.
  
• Backgrounds are now randomly chosen at start and do not change.
  
• The sound that signals a fault is now played when the ball touches the ground.
  
• Adapted the freeze time on smashes to smash intensities.
  
• Fixed some sound balance issues.
  
• Lowered dash distance
• AI can talk while beating you