Foot Tennis Game: From Stick Figures to Online Matches

Foot tennis is a sport I've loved for a long time: a net, a ball, and the rule that you can't use your hands. Football meets volleyball. It's played seriously and competitively in many countries, under many different names, and I'd never seen a mobile game that treated it with much care. So I made one: a foot tennis game called Foot Tennis Stars.

It started flat: a 2D offline game

The first Foot Tennis Stars was 2D. Side view, two players, a net in the middle, and that was it. It was fully offline, no account, nothing to connect to. You opened it and played.

I liked that simplicity, and I still protect it: you can still play without internet. But a single match gets old. The first thing players (and I) wanted was a reason to play the next one.

League, then cup

So I slowly added structure. A league first: a season of matches and a table to climb. Then a cup, with the knockout tension a league doesn't have. Neither was technically hard. What was hard was tuning the opponents so that climbing the table felt earned rather than inevitable or impossible.

I spent a lot of weekends just playing seasons and adjusting numbers.

From stick figures to 3D

For a long time the players were, honestly, stick figures. Functional, readable, a bit sad. At some point I decided the game deserved real characters, and that meant going to 3D.

That was a bigger jump than I expected. 3D meant new animation, a camera that had to follow the ball without making people dizzy, and physics that looked right from an angle rather than from the side. The ball's arc, the timing of a bicycle kick, the way a player plants a foot: all of it had to be rebuilt. The game you see now looks nothing like the one I started with, and most of that is this step.

The hardest step: online matches

The latest and hardest thing I've added is online matches. Everything before this ran on one phone. Online means two phones, two people, and the internet between them, and the internet does not care about your game feeling fair.

Latency. A ball in foot tennis crosses the net in well under a second. If one player sees it a few hundred milliseconds late, they lose, and they can tell something is wrong even if they can't name it. I had to decide what each phone simulates on its own and what it waits to hear about, and every choice had a cost.

Matchmaking. Finding another player quickly, at any hour, when the game is small, is a real problem. Too strict and nobody finds a match; too loose and a new player gets crushed by someone far better.

Fairness. When both players think they hit the ball, who's right? When one connection drops, who gets the point? These questions have no perfect answers, only answers that feel acceptable to most people most of the time.

I'm not going to pretend online is finished. It works, it's fun when it works, and I'm still improving it with every update.

The community

One thing that genuinely surprised me: a Turkish foot-tennis community found the game and got behind it. People who actually play the sport, telling me what felt right and what didn't. That kind of feedback is worth more than anything, and it pushed me to take the sport's details seriously.

Where it is now

Foot Tennis Stars has been on the App Store since September 2026, in several languages. The newest version I've been working on adds online matches and a Nations Cup mode. Online is where my attention is right now: smoother matches, fairer outcomes, faster matchmaking. An Android version is coming soon, too.

If you play, I'd love to know how a match felt, especially an online one.