This game started some years ago as a physical board game, I used what I had at the time, which was a common rectangular white board.

I often thought about how to better transport that board so the extra-dimensional goals were abandoned.

I opted for the older version style, which was 8 circles in the outer-most column of each team's area.

It worked, people seemed to grasp well enough that those circles were goals, but the art was always lacking because in my mind the arena is clearly a torus - donut - (because the ball and athletes teleport across the arena in any direction when exiting it) and I always said there was only 1 goal since the extremities of the arena are actually connected!

If the ball entered from one side, blue scores, the other, green.

It was "true", but not really because the mechanics (and art) were missing.

The ball wasn't going diagonally through the cells C00, J00, C19 and J19 as expected from such a structure. For example, imagine a ball is coming from D01 to C00 (just like in the image above), it is natural to assume it would continue its path to B19 and vice-versa, as it does in the image (as featured in-game), but in older versions this shot would have also been a goal (a shorter one) because of the antiquated visual aspect of the goal that was dragged from the original board game.

It would have been crazy to assume the ball would go through these cells without scoring because of the circles in the cell.

Because of this changes, now you can't score anymore shooting from behind the goal as you could in older versions, but you can still dunk from behind! This may sound counter-intuitive, but stems from the wish to preserve the full dunk effect (placing the ball on the goal instead of shooting it), and also from the code's perspective it made little sense to destroy this feature since dunking is not connected at all to the shooting process.

Also dunks are dope.

It might seem a minor issue, but it really adds upon the "only 1 goal" narrative, which is the best visual interpretation of the structure if it really came to be played on a torus that has some sort of gravity to it.

More about the art, the goal (since now you know there is only one) is extra-dimensional, meaning it stands out from the torus like a tea cup handle, and therefore it stands out also from the arena to aid in the communication of this trait.

See you soon!