Developer’s Blog: Stick Tennis
It’s Stick Sports storytime! With the Nadal Open over, and Wimbledon just around the corner, it’s the perfect time to tell our users the story of Stick Tennis, just like we did with Stick Cricket in our previous post. Keep on reading to find out everything about your favourite tennis game!
In 2007, after seeing the success of Stick Cricket, the team decided it was time to tackle a new sport. They looked at the different types of tennis games that were popular at the moment and found the opportunity to apply our faster and snappier approach to game-play, which was more enjoyable for the casual player.
The first version of Stick Tennis was a flash game, and just like our cricket and soccer games, Stick Tennis started with the World Domination mode.
Five years later, we had the opportunity to shift to mobile, so we rebuilt the game from scratch. The browser game was controlled by the PC keyboard. Controlling the shot direction and player movement was tough to translate to the touch screen devices, mainly because we wanted to keep things easy. We tried many different techniques before finally settling on the ‘swipe anywhere’ hitting controls and Auto-Run player movement. We were quite satisfied with the game engine we’d built, it was fun to play and presented a skilful challenge to players.
However, the game design was simple. It was a compendium of game modes ported over from the web-based games without much change. Stick Tennis offered a selection of modes to choose from: a practice mode to hone your skills, the classic World Domination mode in which the user plays against tennis champions, and a Slams mode, which mimics the four Grand Slams. We also added daily challenges to give our users matches they could play each day and get a ranking on our global leaderboard.
We were uncertain if it would be successful in the age of emerging F2P game mechanics on mobile, but gladly it was! Stick Tennis launched on iOS during Wimbledon and amassed more than one million downloads in the first week. We even had the chance to sponsor an event at the Queen’s Club, in which the attendees could play Stick Tennis at the championship.
To celebrate Wimbledon (beginning on Monday!) we’ve released a Stick Tennis update with new players for the England Slam 2019. Download Stick Tennis and tweet us your results for a chance to win a Stick Tennis t-shirt!
