A 2019 soccer pinball game rebuilt in seven days with Astra and Unity

devseb@astrohound

This is one week of rebuilding Soccer Pinball Pro with Astra + Unity CLI. Day 1 vs Day 7.

I see so many people on here one-shotting these incredible systems and games, and I’m constantly blown away by what people are building. But my approach with this has been a little different. This isn’t a new game or an experiment. It’s a rebuild of a game I originally made in 2019, and I’ve been trying to stay true to what made that game fun while finally building everything I wanted it to be back then.

In seven days I’ve gone from getting the basic game working in a different engine to rebuilding the players, improving the AI, adding passing, tackles, bicycle kicks, better ball feedback, dynamic camera movement, new lighting and shadows, grass, a new scoreboard, goal effects, and an actual PvE match mode. And I’ve been able to iterate on all of it almost as quickly as I can think of things to change.

But the important part is that this is my vision. It isn’t a screenshot or concept I pulled from somewhere and asked Astra/Codex to recreate. This is a game and an idea I’ve had sitting in the back of my mind for years. I executed on that idea in 2019, but what I was capable of making then was nowhere near what I had actually envisioned.

Unity itself is still probably the slowest part of this workflow. Waiting on compiles, entering play mode, importing, building, and all those little interruptions add up. Unity 7 intends to address a lot of that, which makes me even more curious about where this workflow goes next.

The part that excites me most isn’t just how much I can build in a week. It’s realizing I can go back to ideas I had years ago and finally build the games I saw in my head at the time.

That has completely changed how I’m thinking about game development. There’s suddenly this massive backlog of ideas that no longer feels out of reach.

@unity @OpenAI