Padel
A padel sports game with simulated shot physics, ragdoll reactions and online multiplayer. In playable alpha with friends, and a long list of things still wrong with the serve.
Padel started with a question: why does no game get the ball right?
Padel is a game about walls. The ball comes off the glass, and the whole rally reorganises around where it will land. Most sports games treat that as a bounce with a coefficient of restitution and move on. Spin survives the wall, the surface has a grain, and the angle you get out depends on how much the ball was already rotating when it went in.
The shot model
Every shot is described by contact point, racket face angle, swing path and swing speed. The game derives spin and launch from those four rather than choosing a shot type from a menu. That means a slice is not a button. It is what happens when the face is open and the path goes down across the ball.
Two players who both understand padel can argue about a point, and the game will side with one of them for a reason you can name.
Netcode
The multiplayer runs on Netcode for GameObjects over Unity Relay, host authoritative. The ball is simulated on the host and reconciled on clients, with input prediction on the racket so a swing feels immediate at 60 ms of latency.
Rallies hold up well. It still breaks on a smash returned off the back glass, where the reconciliation window and the wall contact land in the same frame. That is the top of the bug list.
Where it is going
The alpha runs as a Windows build and I play it with friends most weeks. A browser version is planned, starting with a single player practice mode. The multiplayer transport is UDP, which browsers do not allow, so the web build needs a WebSocket transport before online play can follow it there.