We finally get to present our first game in the Bones Game Engine! The game is small, but it's fun and ready to play. It's exciting for us to release this project for a lot of reasons. We've been waiting to produce our first game for a long time and it's great to see, as small as it is, something finally come forth for our efforts.

Getting the game

You can play the complete Striker Ball game right away on a nifty web version, or you can download the game for free if you want it on your computer.

The code is also source available on github to let you see how it was made.

Right now we are working on game-dev in our free time, so we’ve set up a donation page for those interested in supporting our future games and further development of the Bones Game Engine.

What was it like?

We wanted to make it as easy on ourselves as possible on our first game without sacrificing the experience of having made the components that are necessary for a complete video-game. It was a pleasant surprise when we started grey-boxing the mechanics and found it took less than a week to implement movement, shooting, and dribbling.

Having finished it now, we see that the majority of the coding was not spent on game mechanics, but on generic game systems like input handling and state management. All of these are very general structures that are needed for almost every kind of game. Given our goals, this plays well into our objective for Striker Ball. It means we really can take small steps and still be laying groundwork for larger games.

Development with the Bones Game Engine was refreshingly smooth. We made slow but consistent progress without any major barriers getting in the way. In my experience not being able to make progress in one day, or sitting, is the biggest problem with making progress as a whole, so this was a relief. Nothing stopped me from completing something each time I put myself to it.

Even being in its’ early stages and having its’ share of issues, the engine’s simplicity still allowed me to root out some of the internal issues I had with it. The Rust language code base for Bones has been immensely important to me as well. I've started projects in other languages, then had to quit because of an untraceable "undefined behavior" error that doesn't exist in Rust. It’s a security on top of the engine that is much appreciated especially in the realm of video-games.

In the future…

While the source code for Striker Ball isn't well polished yet, I’m hoping to clean up the code and fill it with comments in order to turn the game into a clear example of how to make a polished Bones game. I want to maintain the simplicity of Bones as our games expand and put on more layers that will make it intuitive to use without having to know the inner workings.

As a further development of Striker Ball we also want to add LAN network play. We will be sharing more details on that in the future as we progress.

Conclusion

Not only is Striker Ball a good example of a simple game built on Bones game engine, we also feel confident that this game serves as an effective stepping stone for our next games. As we move forward with new projects we hope to be able to document more of the process than we were able to while making Striker Ball, creating more videos and more blog posts that will give you a better idea of what it looks like to make games in Bones.

We’re excited for the future, we’ll see you soon!