Developer Interview: Slapshot: Rebound

Hey! I'm Gilles, also known as Erveon; I'm the director of Oddshot Games. We're a small, fully remote team headquartered in Belgium with a huge passion for multiplayer games. The studio was founded in 2020 to build Slapshot: Rebound, and that's exactly what we've been doing for the last four years. [During this] time, we've had the pleasure of welcoming some amazing people to the team and nearly two million players to the game!

Something that's not obvious when you play the game is how much time was spent fine-tuning exact values little by little. During early development, we spent months just tweaking little things like player speed, puck speed, strength, bumping, and pretty much any interaction you can think of. I even gave players a slider to change those values themselves, after which they'd let me know what they preferred playing with; I'm really proud of our process and final result. The interactions in the game look simple on the surface, but that's exactly what we wanted! It gets very obvious very quickly when you play that everything works the way it does for a reason, and the skill ceiling is very high as a result.

It's hard to pick which aspect was the most challenging; if anything, it's making sure all the challenging aspects work together well. This is our first commercial game as a team, so there was definitely a lot of figuring things out that might be obvious to other [developers]. Making the game feel just right was high up there; the netcode programming still gives me nightmares, and realising there was no off-the-shelf solution for the things we wanted to do with our online systems was an experience as well. We ended up creating our own in-house back-end system that handles everything: accounts, stats, parts of the server orchestration, leaderboards, matchmaking, lobbies, chat, moderation, shop, and so many more things. It took an enormous amount of time and effort, but it has become the heart of the game. I would argue it really sets us apart from similar games at this size because everything has been tailor-made to the needs of Slapshot: Rebound.

Rocket League has been a huge inspiration for us; there's no game like it, and I absolutely love [it]. Before working on Slapshot: Rebound, I helped organise tournaments for Rocket League and even helped with the qualifiers of an early season of RLCS. Other people definitely see the comparison, too. We got a shoutout on an RLCS broadcast from a pro player [who] said that when they're tired of Rocket League, they play Slapshot to take a break. That really made my day!

Of course! Most of them are very obvious, but some require a little more knowledge of hockey to understand. For example, one of the more time-consuming achievements called "Surpassing the Great", is to score more than 894 goals in your Slapshot: Rebound career. I'll let the hockey fans make the connection :-)

We intend to keep updating the game as we have for the last four years; full release for us is not calling the game "finished" but rather an evolution of our priorities. During Early Access, we prioritised a very good core experience and base game. Now that we're fully released and happy with the base game experience, this focus has shifted towards adding more features that will further set the game apart from its peers. We'll be releasing a roadmap soon! First, we're taking a small break to both take a breather and observe the player experience to see what people want us to focus on.

The very core of the concept did not, but the way the game plays really has. We originally didn't intend for the puck to leave the ice; it was only after one of our iteration sessions [that] a team member messed with the values so much that it broke the restriction, and we figured out that adding the extra dimension of "lifting the puck" was actually a lot of fun, so we turned it into a proper feature!

The more the merrier! Slapshot: Rebound requires six players to start a matchmaking match, and a match takes about five minutes, so I'm happy to welcome everyone to the game to let players find a match at any time and play with players close to their skill rating. Even those that never spend a cent make the game better for everyone else that way.

It has been great; I'm sure that if we had gone for a different business model, the game would not have done nearly as well as it has. On a more personal level, it's also just amazing to see lots of players play what you made.

The Pond was an idea I had at the very beginning of development. I love the competitive nature of the game, but as we say in Dutch, "De boog kan niet altijd gespannen staan.", [which] loosely translates to: "The bow can't always be drawn." Meaning there needs to be time to just chill and relax. As an avid MMO player, that is an aspect I've always loved about those games. You engage with the content that suits the pace at which you'd like to play. The same goes for The Pond; it's a place to play with others, socialise and train however you'd like at your own pace. During the game's development, I also learned about NBA 2K's "The Park", which is a very similar concept (and name, now that I think of it) which its players love; [this] really solidified that the concept of The Pond was worth making for Slapshot: Rebound. We don't know exactly what we'll add to it in the future, but we do know we will be adding more to it.

Free-to-play games live and die by the size of their active player base, so we're always keeping a close eye on that. We update the game very regularly and actively talk to our players to figure out what they truly want from the game, what makes them want to play and what makes them want to close the game. Virtually anyone [who] has ever tagged me on Discord with a genuine question has gotten a reply because that's how I've been getting most of the ideas for improvements to the game. It takes an enormous amount of time and can be exhausting, but it's well worth it. If one player voices their frustration with an aspect of the game, it's very likely that hundreds of others are thinking the same thing. The players show their appreciation for it as well, which feels great.

If you had to choose who in Oddshot Games could make it big in hockey, who would it be, and why?

We already have a sumo wrestling minigame on The Pond, but curling with Slapshot's physics would be hilarious! On a serious note, I would say stay tuned, and you may find out. ;-)