Penny Football - Reimagined
My son Araz, 9 years old at the moment of releasing this game, challenged me to turn our kitchen-table penny football matches into a real game. Every mode, every rule twist, and half the "that's not fair!" balancing feedback came from him. Consider him the creative director - I just wrote the code.
A cross-platform multiplayer game built with Godot 4.x where players flick disc-shaped pills across various game fields using slingshot aiming. Play solo against AI or compete online against real opponents with server-authoritative physics.
| Mode | Description | Scoring |
|---|---|---|
| CoinBall | Flick your pills through a central gate | First to 3 goals |
| Football | Push a ball into the opponent's goal | First to 3 goals |
| Battle Arena | Knock opponents into gravitational pits | Last team standing (best of 3) |
| Volleyball | Smack the ball over the net onto the opponent's side | First to 3 points |
| Curling | Slide pills toward the house - closest to the button scores | First to 5 ends |
All five modes support both solo (vs AI) and online (vs real players) play.
- Aim - Touch or click and drag behind your pill to set direction and power (slingshot style)
- Release - Let go to shoot. In simultaneous modes, both players shoot blind at the same time
- Watch - Physics resolves collisions, bounces, and scoring
- Repeat - Next round begins after all pills settle
The game features 30 selectable avatars, three AI difficulty levels (Easy / Normal / Hard), and a lobby system for online matchmaking across all five modes.
| Component | Technology |
|---|---|
| Game engine | Godot 4.6 (GDScript) |
| Multiplayer backend | Nakama open-source game server |
| Server physics | Custom 2D circle physics engine (TypeScript) |
| Networking model | Server-authoritative with client-side trajectory replay |
| Platforms | iOS, Android, Desktop (Windows, macOS, Linux) |
shootball/
├── addons/
│ └── com.heroiclabs.nakama/ # Nakama Godot SDK
├── assets/
│ ├── avatars/ # 30 player avatars
│ ├── sounds/ # Music and sound effects
│ └── ... # Field textures, ball sprites, UI
├── scenes/ # 13 Godot scenes (.tscn)
│ ├── main_menu.tscn # Entry point
│ ├── online_lobby.tscn # Matchmaking lobby
│ ├── game.tscn # Solo CoinBall
│ ├── game_football.tscn # Solo Football
│ ├── game_online_football.tscn # Online Football
│ └── ... # All 5 solo + 5 online + avatar select
├── scripts/ # 17 GDScript files
│ ├── constants.gd # Shared constants (autoload)
│ ├── online.gd # Nakama client wrapper (autoload)
│ ├── pill.gd # RigidBody2D game piece
│ ├── ai_player.gd # AI opponent (raycast strategy)
│ ├── game_*.gd # Solo mode logic (5 files)
│ └── game_online_*.gd # Online mode logic (5 files)
└── project.godot
The client runs Godot's built-in 2D physics engine locally. An AI opponent selects shots using raycast-based strategy evaluation with three difficulty tiers.
Online matches use a server-authoritative model to guarantee identical results for both players:
- Both players submit shot inputs to the server
- The server runs a custom 2D physics simulation (circle-circle and circle-wall collisions with damping, bounce, and friction)
- The server sends back a simulation result containing the full trajectory of all objects frame-by-frame, plus game outcome data (goals, eliminations, scores)
- Clients replay the trajectory by positioning frozen physics bodies, so both players see identical animations
- After replay completes, clients send a ready signal and the next round begins
This eliminates desync issues caused by floating-point differences between clients.
The backend lives in a separate repository: shootball-server
It runs on Nakama with a custom TypeScript match handler that manages matchmaking, physics simulation, scoring, and game state for all five online modes.
- Godot 4.6+
- For online play: a running shootball-server instance
- Clone this repository
- Open the project in Godot 4.6+
- Run the main scene (
scenes/main_menu.tscn)
Solo modes work immediately without a server. For online play, update the server address in scripts/online.gd if needed.
| Setting | Location | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Viewport size | project.godot |
1280 x 720 |
| AI difficulty | In-game settings | Normal |
| Master volume | In-game settings | 50% |
| Server host | scripts/online.gd |
shootball.avardgah.com:7350 |
Contributions are welcome for educational and non-commercial purposes. Feel free to open issues, suggest improvements, or submit pull requests.
This project is licensed under the CC BY-NC 4.0 (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International) license. You are free to use, share, and adapt this work for non-commercial and educational purposes with appropriate credit. See the LICENSE file for details.