[devblog] Welcome to Pastel Park
Posted: Mon Oct 13, 2025 5:45 pm
*Casually checking pixeltennis.com*
"Oh, there are more than 1000 people visiting the site right now. Did it become viral for no reason?"
"Uhm... why is the page so slow?"
*Receives mail from hosting provider*
"We have taken down your website because of a massive DDoS attack"
That was definitely unexpected. To keep it brief: after about a day of downtime, pixeltennis.com is back online, now fortified with some technical safeguards against future attacks. It's actually a fascinating subject to dive into - though I wouldn’t have minded if it had come up at a more convenient time.
With today’s news, there is a new update for Pixel Tennis available which includes the all new court Pastel Park. This marks the fifth playable court in the game, adding even more visual variety to your matches.
From now on, when you create a room, a court will be randomly preselected to keep things dynamic, but don’t worry, you can still switch to your favorite at any time. I will spare you the deep dive into the countless technical tweaks under the hood, but if you're curious, you can find all the details in the changelog.
By the way, what happened since the last update roughly a year ago? One of the biggest topics was the evaluation of switching to the Godot game engine. While the engine itself is great, migrating Pixel Tennis revealed several limitations - particularly in areas like mobile performance, animation toolsets, camera functionality and exception handling. Additionally, Godot’s open architecture makes it challenging to safeguard the game from decompilation or external tampering. That might be acceptable for a single-player experience, but Pixel Tennis is fundamentally a PvP title with an online progression system. If I were to develop a game from scratch again, I would likely choose Godot. It is lightweight, open source and I have even used it to build a few private apps. That said, given the complexity of migrating Pixel Tennis, especially with its existing architecture, the game will remain on Unity.
I really wish I had more exciting updates to share, but unfortunately, life outside of game development threw a few not-so-nice curveballs my way. Those unexpected events took up a lot of time and energy, which meant less progress on the game than I had hoped. Anyway, I hope stuff will get better going forward!
See you on the court!
"Oh, there are more than 1000 people visiting the site right now. Did it become viral for no reason?"
"Uhm... why is the page so slow?"
*Receives mail from hosting provider*
"We have taken down your website because of a massive DDoS attack"
That was definitely unexpected. To keep it brief: after about a day of downtime, pixeltennis.com is back online, now fortified with some technical safeguards against future attacks. It's actually a fascinating subject to dive into - though I wouldn’t have minded if it had come up at a more convenient time.
With today’s news, there is a new update for Pixel Tennis available which includes the all new court Pastel Park. This marks the fifth playable court in the game, adding even more visual variety to your matches.
- Pixel-Tennis-Pastel-Park-Court.jpg (444.76 KiB) Viewed 897 times
From now on, when you create a room, a court will be randomly preselected to keep things dynamic, but don’t worry, you can still switch to your favorite at any time. I will spare you the deep dive into the countless technical tweaks under the hood, but if you're curious, you can find all the details in the changelog.
By the way, what happened since the last update roughly a year ago? One of the biggest topics was the evaluation of switching to the Godot game engine. While the engine itself is great, migrating Pixel Tennis revealed several limitations - particularly in areas like mobile performance, animation toolsets, camera functionality and exception handling. Additionally, Godot’s open architecture makes it challenging to safeguard the game from decompilation or external tampering. That might be acceptable for a single-player experience, but Pixel Tennis is fundamentally a PvP title with an online progression system. If I were to develop a game from scratch again, I would likely choose Godot. It is lightweight, open source and I have even used it to build a few private apps. That said, given the complexity of migrating Pixel Tennis, especially with its existing architecture, the game will remain on Unity.
I really wish I had more exciting updates to share, but unfortunately, life outside of game development threw a few not-so-nice curveballs my way. Those unexpected events took up a lot of time and energy, which meant less progress on the game than I had hoped. Anyway, I hope stuff will get better going forward!
See you on the court!