Valo Motion, the viral phenomenon from Finland, developed a completely new type of sports game. After over a year of extensive game development, they are launching Jumpball for their award-winning mixed reality trampoline game platform – ValoJump?. Since esports has been growing significantly during the last few years, Valo Motion created a game that combines competitions with a physical exercise, trampoline jumping. As a competitive ball game, Jumpball has been designed to also fit events and tournaments.

“With Jumpball, we wanted to take the best parts of sports and video games and combine them into a new super-powered trampoline ball sport. We wanted each match of Jumpball to be an exciting competition that’s both fun to play and fun to watch,” says Lauri Lehtonen, the lead developer for ValoJump.

Valo Motion’s pioneering body tracking technology makes sure that the game flawlessly reacts to the players’ jumps on the trampoline while ensuring the game is both responsive and intuitive to play. Valo Motion is constantly improving the body tracking software and adjusting it so that it fits the new games. Jumpball, for example, takes advantage of its new custom collision physics technology and calculates which direction the player hits the ball and with how much force. In other words, the software now calculates the collision between the ball and the player. As a result, the new technology determines the exact direction and force for when the player hits or kicks the ball, allowing the players to accurately aim their shots and adjust their hit power.

To keep the game appealing for a long time, the game mechanics allow the players to keep improving themselves with numerous mechanics. For example, the higher the player jumps to hit the ball the harder the hit will be and the less time the opponent will have to react to the shot and block it.

The game has both single and double player modes. In the single person mode, the player is faced with one of the AI opponents. In the two-player mode, Jumpball is played on two adjacent ValoJump trampolines that connect the players automatically to the same game. All the games on ValoJump are played by one person on one trampoline. This brings safety and automatic physical distancing between people. ValoJump can even be rendered completely touchless, making the gameplay also hygienic and thus safer during the COVID-19 restrictions. (2020/11/12)