Enter the cosmological ballgame: NEBUBAL. Fractalized baseballs and galactic sprinting build into this absurd shared-keyboard multiplayer game's charm, inspired by Mario Party and Track & Field.

 I've noticed a funny thing that happens when you're making a sports game: All of a sudden, your assumptions about how the given sport works have to be reflected in your program. What emerges are all kinds of silly questions that never occur as either a player or spectator. For example, in one of my earlier games called Terrific Tennis: How do you handle scoring in 15 point increments when they're effectively single digit scores? How do you consider the deuce state, which emerges when tied at a specific score? We work these questions out in our heads without issue, but sports games need to mete out these obvious rules and flows.

NEBUBAL deviates from reality's baseball and instead plays with its rules to make for a fun, if even slightly athletic, head-to-head multiplayer experience. It brings a minimalism and snappiness that feels at home in the arcade realm. I love a wide variety of sports and sports games; but baseball, either real or digital, has never been a favorite. NEBUBAL is something like a distillate of what I do like about baseball. It's about big swings, running fast, and some little mind games.

Normally I come into a game jam with a strong direction of what I am trying to make, and then pare down the scope until it's manageable for the given time I have to devote to it. For this year's LOWREZJAM, I sorted out that baseball was indeed the foundation, but I was more concerned with nailing the gamefeel of something like baseball rather than digitizing the sport. It turns out something like baseball is pretty darn fun, as I had a great time testing this with some friends locally. There's something amusing about the asymmetry between offense and defense that draws out laughter.

My assumption is that most players on Itch aren't looking for multiplayer games, let alone browser based, keyboard-smashing ones. If you give the game a go, I'd love to know how the tutorial and learning of the game go for you. Even better if you have a chance to play with a friend, I'd love to hear your feedback.