ThunderBashersThunderBashers

Robots in a circular pit bash a storm-charged ball at each other. Spinning is the whole kit: it strikes the ball, parries an incoming hit, and shoves a rival in close. If the ball catches you while you are not spinning, you are out. Last one standing wins. Five bot personalities, each a data profile for reaction time, aim, and nerve, fill a three-arena campaign.

I built the jam version in five days after switching from Unreal to Unity mid-jam, and drew the robots and arena by hand. The mechanic that took longest was the one that sounded easiest: the ball kills you. It only started to feel fair once the ball showed its own danger with a heat tint. That story is in the postmortem.

Version 1.1, live on Wavedash since September, is a staged visual overhaul: a league identity and UI kit, robots rebuilt as models and rendered back into the original sprite rig, one flat-shaded style for the whole match frame, seven dressed arenas, announcer voice lines, procedural sound, and a strike-feel pass with hit-stop and punch-zoom. Every stage sits behind a flag, so the shipped game stayed playable at every commit. The overhaul write-up covers the order and the reasoning.

Online play followed. You name and decorate your robot in the Garage, then open a room on Wavedash, public or locked with a password, and fight up to three other operators with bots filling any empty seats. The netcode is host-authoritative on top of the untouched single-player simulation: clients send input, the host runs the same robot and ball code that ships offline, and state comes back over the Wavedash SDK’s lobbies and peer-to-peer transport. Slow-motion on a strike stays local to the striker’s screen, because a global time scale cannot be shared.