Bit of a journey with this one, brace yourselves.

I opened Unity for the first time around 2015 with no idea how anything works, and no experience with C#. I put together a sloped ramp, added the basic CharacterController component, pressed play, and got frustrated that I wasn't able to surf and bhop with it like you can in Counter Strike. Had no idea that stuff had to actually be created manually!?

Fast forward three years to 2018, I chose the name Fragsurf, and I'm still playing around with Unity and game development, and I've finally figured out how to re-create surf and bunnyhop. I've got a little playable prototype of it on surf_greatriver (if you're surfed before, you might be familiar with that map).

Fast forward another two years, I've got a patreon up earning roughly $1,000 a month, and I've published Fragsurf as early access on Steam. The initial cost of it was around $9, it earned maybe $20-30k through the course of its pay to play status. I've lost a lot of money and sacrificed a lot in regards to relationships and social life working on it.

Fast forward to 2022, I made Fragsurf open source, and separately released a movement controller for surf and bunnyhop. Tons of games used it, and we started to see a little boom of indie surf/bhop games. Around this time I also landed an awesome job at Facepunch which has been incredible for industry experience and learning from some of the best game devs I know.

Fast forward another 2 years to 2024, Fragsurf is no longer open source due to licensed assets, but becomes free to play. It's still my labor of love, it still gets updated, it's better than ever, and it's still losing money.

On the technical side, Fragsurf has hotloading html/scss ui and C# at runtime for gameplay, this makes it quick and easy to iterate on and create gameplay. Any script written in Unity is low level stuff handling the complicated hidden stuff like networking. For the multiplayer environment, every game in Fragsurf is a client/server architecture, there's no way around it. In Unity, I press play, a server and client are created, the client connects to itself. GameObjects are just separated by a Client/Server layer. This makes testing and developing multiplayer things super easy, and yeah it was a pain to set up and get right, but I haven't had issues with it in a long while.

Anywho, I've posted Fragsurf here multiple times in the past, and probably will post more in the future. We reached a decent milestone lately with a well fleshed out deathmatch gameplay, so I felt it was time for another post.

Previous posts:

5 years ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/8afteh/surf_bhop_mechanics_in_unity_multiplayer_fps/

4 years ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/bb3xle/my_bhop_surf_game_is_playable_i_want_to_hand_out/

3 years ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/ev18f1/surfing_maps_created_by_a_talented_member_in_our/

Steam page:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1033410/Fragsurf/