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Thanks for playing! One might want to imagine that the skull ball is haunted and sometimes has a mind of its own, but there's actually an interesting story behind the quirky aim / trajectory...

I found that Unity's physics is kind of quirky when it comes to bounces and fast moving paddles that sometimes pass halfway though the ball before registering a collision, making them go off in a somewhat random direction if you hit it quickly. Currently, the tombstone paddles work best when you hold them still and let the ball bounce into them, rather than swatting at the ball with them.  Without any autoassist on, it way too hard to aim the ball at a target on the other side of the court, as I found earlier on in development.

To try to compensate for the Unity physics quirkiness, the skull/ball has an  "autoassist" feature so when you hit it, it will kinda swerve toward a door it is most nearest to heading in the direction of in front of it. Or if it bounces off a wall or a door, it will try to aim for the player on the other side.

The AI opponent also uses the autoassist feature to cheat too. When it is winning by more than 3 points, many of the shots it make will try to autoassist swerve towards 1 meter in front of your headset. When it is losing by more than 3 points, it will use a stronger autoassist to make the ball swerve towards your doors. The goal of the AI was to make it a very close game, rather than to win.

But still, luck and quirky Unity physics  plays a huge factor in the Unity physics bounces for both the human and AI; so much so that the AI doesn't bother to even try to aim at things. After the jam, I might add an option that turns autoassist off entirely.

If I were to try making something like this again, I'd probably make each tombstone paddle into its own separate rigidbody with continuous collision detection too. Right now, they are just a child of the XR Rig's kinematic rigid body, and that could be the problem, since it's really just their transforms that are moving, rather than real rigidbody movement.

The small size might be because I compiled it using IL2CPP rather than Mono, and the only texture used was the subtle texture of the pumpkin dome's walls.