Overview / Usage

Slapshot: Rebound is a physics-based multiplayer game where you play an arcade style match of hockey. No shoot button, no puck glue, no RNG. It’s up to you and your team to take control of the puck, pass, shoot, outplay your opponents. Play with your friends or team up with other Slapshot players!

We noticed a severe lack of hockey games on the PC market, as well as a lack of physics based multiplayer games. Combining these two resulted in Slapshot. We let as much as we can be directly impacted by everything the player does to interact with the physics through their character. Players have the ability to play with others through matchmaking or with friends in custom lobbies. There's several different practice modes to hone in your skills.

Methodology / Approach

We've used Unity to develop the game client itself, Nodejs for the Slapshot Services that power the multiplayer services such as leaderboards, matchmaking, parties, lobbies and game server orchestration, using PostgreSQL as a database. The servers are headless Unity instances spun up in Docker containers. The initial setup of these technologies was straightforward, the real technical challenge started when the player base started growing and we needed to scale. Recently, we moved our leaderboards to a mixture of SQL and Redis to provide better real-time support and have blazing fast results for all the combinations of the 4 regions we support, all time, weekly and monthly for several different categories of scores in the game (it's a lot!).

Technologies Used

• Unity (C#)
• Nodejs + Express (JavaScript API & Services)
• Vue (Admin panel front-end)
• PostgreSQL (General data collection/retrieval)
• Redis (Leaderboard scaling)
• Docker (Server containerization)
• Visual Studio (+ Code)
• Discord (Communication)
• Clubhouse.io (Project Management)
• Notion (Knowledgebase)
• Sentry (Error collection and tracking)
• Papertrail (Centralized logging)