Stikbold! A Dodgeball Adventure announced for PS4

Grab your gym shorts and hang onto your headbands! Our hard-hitting sports brawler, Stikbold! A Dodgeball Adventure, is coming to PlayStation 4!

Stikbold! is a quirky, over-the-top action sports game described best as a mix of dodgeball and a fighting game. Make use of everything from dodgeballs and jellyfish to beehives to eliminate your competitors as you duke it out, against friends and family, on a variety of unlikely courts.

Or, team up with your best friend, favourite relative or even the A.I., and venture out on an exciting co-op adventure in the charming story campaign. Fight your way through hippies, whales, skeletons and more, as you set out on a selfless rescue mission to save the rival team and win back the championship trophy!

Origins

The original concept for the game came about during Nordic Game Jam. We were five eager game design students from IT-University in Copenhagen and we joined forces around the strange experiment that eventually became Stikbold!.

Stikbold! received the ‘most fun’ award and came in third overall. This encouraged us to continue work on the game, with the goal of turning it into a full-blown console release. To pursue our dreams we formed a company and began a long and exciting journey!

Inspiration

Stikbold is actually the name of a Scandinavian folk game often played in schoolyards and at playgrounds during recess or Physical Education. Like most folk games, Stikbold has a ton of variations and abbreviations, but is always a type of tag played by chugging balls after each other.

Stikbold! A Dodgeball Adventure is a very loose interpretation of its folk game counterpart. Mainly we have focused on cultivating the foundations of folk/playground games, which are typically very playful, festive and inclusive by nature.

In this spirit, we try to give players increased agency and responsibility over the action and outcome of the matches to make the game feel more personal. For instance, players may take control of various hazardous events after elimination from the round. Apart from giving eliminated players something to do between rounds, this is an encouragement for them to intervene with the balance of the action.

Whether players opt to chase revenge on their nemesis or target the leading player, this influence often lead to wonderfully personal player interactions. Making the action personal is an attempt to play into the social dynamics of couch multiplay – a feeling we hope is coming through when you’re playing the game.

If you have comments, questions or just want to know more, you can follow the game on Twitter @Stikbold or check out Stikbold.com.