Nice Bowling

Nice Bowling is a goofy-ass, unfair bowling game that's going to throw a ton of weird, unpredictable obstacles in your lane to make bowling the chaotic mess it was always meant to be!  

Bombs?  Fish?  Jelly Blobs?  Variable Pin Sizes?  You name it, it's coming for your turkey.

• Inspired by Wii Sports and Warioware
• Randomly selected effects are applied to the ball, pins, lane, and/or environment at the start of each frame- each bowling frame, not each time the GPU redraws the screen. Even I think that would be way too much.
• Pass and play multiplayer- the worst kind of multiplayer!

Nice Bowling Source Code

Wanna try and make something out of this?  I've made the source code freely available to any dev who wants to try their luck.  It's kind of a mess, not gonna lie, so godspeed!  Keep in mind you'll need RetroAesthetics and YoungGen Tech's Ball Pack 1.0 if you want the whole package.  More info in readme on Github.

This was the first video game I ever made and I learned a lot during its development. I ended up releasing it on Google Play and Amazon but Google started requiring hefty privacy policies to be included into the game itself and that kind of turned out to be a nail in the coffin as it was already on a version of Unity3D that Google Play didn't support.   So I said no thanks. 

Originally, I planned to make a PC release but really, really hated the controls. They were too complicated when I tried to add spin to the ball based on how the player swipes their finger. That one single movement decided the speed, angle, and spin and it became really frustrating for players. Which, admittedly, was kinda funny. 

In my attempts to address player complaints feedback, I added even more math to make the swipes straighter to fairly disappointing results. After I abandoned Nice Bowling, my friend’s 11-year-old son was restless in a restaurant and his dad suggested playing 'the bowling game' which he instantly remembered me foisting it on him to playtest and promptly started crying. Lol git gud, kid.