Voiceball

Voiceball started from a simple, strange, and very sticky idea: what if foosball was controlled by your voice?

Players create waves from microphone input, using pitch and volume to hit a ball into the other player's goal. The result is part sports game, part performance, and part room-wide icebreaker.

The goal was not to make players feel polished. It was to make them feel brave enough to be a little ridiculous, then discover that there was real skill hiding inside the silliness.

I contributed to Voiceball across art, design, and technical art, helping shape both how the game looked and how it communicated its unusual input system to players.

Because the game depends on people immediately understanding that their voice affects the field, the visuals needed to make sound feel physical. The waveform representation had to be readable, responsive, and entertaining to watch.

This was a small indie team, so the work was naturally collaborative. Design, implementation, presentation, and event feedback all fed into each other quickly.

One of the most interesting parts of Voiceball is that voice is personal. Players do not all have the same pitch range, volume, confidence, or comfort level.

The game evolved around that reality, including systems that adapt to each player's vocal range and respond to quieter or louder players and environments.

That made the design challenge more than input detection. The game needed to encourage expression without making players feel like the software was judging their voice.

Voiceball was shown at events around Atlanta and the Southeast, including DreamHack, Indie Bits, MomoCon, SIEGE, Southern Fried Gaming Expo, and Terminus.

Each showing gave us immediate feedback because the game is extremely observable. You can tell very quickly when players are confused, shy, competitive, delighted, or fully committed to yelling at a digital ball.

That event feedback shaped how we refined the experience, especially around clarity, spectacle, and helping players understand the relationship between their voice and the game field.

Voiceball was selected for Alt.Ctrl.GDC in 2018 and won Best Game at the Georgia Tech Global Game Jam site in 2017.

It was also recognized in my resume history through nominations and showcases including the ArtsATL Luminary Award for Arts Innovation, Alt.Ctrl.GDC, and the GGDA Best in Georgia competition.

That recognition reflected what made the project special: it was playful, approachable, technically unusual, and very hard to ignore once people started playing.

Voiceball remains one of the clearest examples of how technical design can create a social moment. The tech was important, but the real success was getting players to perform, laugh, compete, and surprise themselves.

For me, it reinforced how much I enjoy work where interaction, visual feedback, technical systems, and human behavior all crash into each other in the best possible way.