Before it was picked up by Ubisoft, the free-to-play Early Access Arena shooter BattleCore Arena - which was (re) launched on Steam today - was a 3-person project. There was one problem: none of the three friends I met at work were 3D animators. 

Plan: Just round the letters.

"We found ourselves without a 3D animator," said lead programmer Romain Bienkowski in the dev diary, translated from French. "And we said to ourselves, "How can I make a video game without animating a character?""That's when we said, "In fact, you can just make a sphere."Because BattleCore is an arena shooter that focuses on motion and physics,

spheres were "perfect" to their concept, anyway, Bienkowski said. Team battles take place in a floating arena and elimination is Smash Bros style: shoot another player to deplete their health, then Poi

players can save themselves from elimination with double jumps and air dashes. Let Ubisoft play a few rounds last weekいthe trickiest movement ability that comes to grip is that your sphere falls out of the air and some pretty fancy maneuvers (you want) solid, I was just doing everything I could to avoid rolling off the map of my own accord, but combined. It is possible to have all the abilities that were given to you. The main thing I noticed was that you feel teamwork is essential: it's really hard to eliminate other players on your own. 

BattleCore now includes a 3v3 mode, all modes for free, and a "competitive team-based Q-ball mode, catch and quantum ball as long as possible"

The game is no longer a three-person project: A trio of friends is an indie game. After winning BattleCore's award at a gaming event, it landed at Ubisoft Bordeaux and, according to Bienkowski, now has more than 20 people, which is technically a re-release since the first version of BattleCore was released on Steam in 2017. That version received the last update in 2019, and the new Ubisoft version of the game has been switched to the free-to-play model - BattleCore makes money on cosmetics

Ubisoft said that because the BattleCore renewal includes a Steam release, it will be able to enforce the exclusive policies of the ubisoft Store and Epic Games Store. It seems to be easing.

It's always hard to say how these niche multiplayer games work. They can be great and still can't make it very far. We loved Knockout City, for example, but its server was closed just a few years later (although the developers released a standalone client for fan servers that were nice). I also remembered Diabotical, the free 2020 arena shooter from the Epic Games Store - it happened to involve a round character and never gained much traction, but its developers recently announced that they are bringing the concept to Steam another.