Just last week, Facepunch showed Riftlight to the world, a colorful arcade shooter

Aug 1, 2014 13:54 GMT  ·  By

After taking the flak of the Rust community last week, when revealing a new project, a space shooter titled Riftlight, developer Facepunch was bold enough to present another project it's working on, a sort of cross between Street Fighter and tennis.

The community behind the company's survival and building game Rust is being vocal about the fact that Facepunch is misusing their resources, squandering them on this wild goose chase instead of focusing on adding more stuff to Rust.

Facepunch programmer Ian James won't have any of that, and he has built a tennis game prototype, intending to make a sports game that he and his colleagues can "play over lunch instead of FIFA."

James has coded a system that replaces Unity's default physics engine, allowing for a bunch of impressive and showy moves like backspin, topspin and curve shots, and he's planning to add a roster of characters, with different strengths, weaknesses and styles, just like in fighting games.

"I wanted to make something different to other projects Facepunch has in development. I'm more of an arcade game developer so wanted to play to those strengths. I also love games with strong local multiplayer modes," James explains.

He has named the prototype "Deuce" for now, and it's an arcade-style tennis game, that focuses on multiplayer and unique characters and courts.

"Some characters will be nimble around the court but with relatively weak hits whilst others may be more cumbersome but pack a heavier return. The characters won't look like typical tennis players, so no Wimbledon starch white shorts here. We want to build a selection of characters that could star in their own games in the future or perhaps play different sports," he continues.

The company has a functional tennis game so far, and there are even some placeholder special moves implemented, but there are many things that still need ironing out before setting anything in stone, and James is constantly experimenting with his ideas.

If you're interesting in seeing a live demo of the game, you can find a video over on the Facepunch blog, and you can check out the concept art pieces in the gallery below. Not exactly Wimbledon material indeed.

The developers will keep delivering updates on Deuce "hopefully every week." The game looks to be pretty well positioned, as there haven't been any good arcade tennis games in a while, especially ones sounding and looking this interesting.

Deuce concept art (6 Images)

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