The Tennis Academy has hit 2000 Wishlists!
What a milestone!
Thank you all so much for supporting my vision of this game. I'll be honest I was shocked it even got to 100 lol, it means a lot that anyone is interested in what I'm creating. My hope is to make something not only fun and cool and gay, but also something that can help, comfort, and inspire people. I want to make something like the games I played while growing up that helped me through rough times and made me into the person I am today.
The game is still very early in development, so thank you for waiting! I'll try to make it worth the wait :)
Currently Working on
Here's the part where I usually go over what I've been up to.
Progress lately has been admittedly slower than I'd like - it's been a busy year so far with moving to a new apartment, the AccessAbility trailer, and I've been hard at work helping with this year's GodotCon in Boston, but I've managed to work on a couple of things lately that have been really cool.
The first is a short Demo Mode that I intend to show at local events. It's got a Character Select screen reminiscent of fighting games where you can choose your opponent and partner, and then it takes you directly into a tennis match with the characters you chose. There's no story or RPG elements, it's strictly a tennis match, so I can get early feedback on what's working and not working, as well as spot more bugs. Here's an early version of the character selection:
[Alt text: The character select screen, with a few characters available in the middle of the screen. There are portraits of the players currently selected.]
Mostly this has been really nice for me to stay motivated with a long-term goal this year. As a solo developer, and someone who is not beholden to any external deadlines from a publisher etc, having achievable goals throughout the year are so important in order to keep staying focused and happy to work on a long-term project like this. Being able to put out a finished thing that I can see people playing for the first time really really helps me stay excited and helps me figure out what I'm doing right or wrong.
I've had a couple of requests that I should make this short demo into a "Practice Mode" or "Exhibition Mode" in the full game, and I'm considering it haha.
It's also helping me to get the matches feel more polished. Right now I'm in the throws of creating the enemy AI (not generative AI, but the old-fashioned meaning of AI lol). I've ended up breaking a lot of things and creating new bugs, which leads to a lot of time spent trying to fix the messes I've made, but ultimately I feel I'm getting closer and closer to having characters act like they're really playing magic tennis with you.
Plus, making a presentable vertical slice of the game has given me an excuse to have fun drawing dialogue portraits for the characters. Here are the school and tennis outfits for Finnelope and Viktor:
[Alt text: 4 dialogue portraits, 2 of Finny in her school uniform and tennis outfit, and 2 of Viktor in his school uniform and tennis outfit. Finny is a short girl with blue hair and a fish. Viktor is a vampire with long silver hair and a red outfit.]
I'm still not exactly sure if this will end up being the final style of the portraits by the time the game is done; I've wrestled a lot with the idea of finding a style that's unique to this game in the way that games like Hades or Persona have an unmistakable portrait style. So I'm still experimenting, but ultimately there are a lot of characters and I'm only one guy so I think keeping them stylistically simple is probably my best bet.
What's Next
So from now until October, I'll be working hard on getting this small demo of the game feeling nice so I can show it off and get some valuable feedback.
How I would love to just dive into the full game and start building content, but alas I still need to hammer out the story. I've been working on a few outline drafts this year, but it's still not where it needs to be, so there's no sense building out the entire game now just for me to repeatedly scrap things as the story changes :) Things like this gameplay demo don't require any story to make, so it's an efficient use of my time until I'm able to get the story in a good place and actually start building content.
As I mentioned earlier, I'm prepping for this year's GodotCon Boston, and I'm giving a talk about UI and UX that you can either catch at the conference itself or on Youtube afterward. Most of the talk will feature examples from this game, so that may interest you!
In Closing
Well, that's all I have for now. Thanks again to everyone so much for the support! Tell a friend about The Tennis Academy 😂
Feel free to come join the discord for more updates and a slowly growing community! We recently discussed other tennis videogames that are good!