About BlitzVolley

Last updated: 18 August 2026

BlitzVolley is a one-on-one 2D beach volleyball game, playable in the browser, developed and maintained by a single person. This page explains where it comes from, how it works under the hood, and what is not done yet.

Where the game comes from

BlitzVolley is inspired by Blobby Volley, the two-blob volleyball game that circulated on home computers in the early two thousands. The attribution is kept, and the characters remain "blobs".

The version you play descends directly from a small game written in Python, locally, on a single screen. A good share of today's physics constants — gravity, jump impulse, lateral acceleration, bounce coefficients — are carried over verbatim. That is not nostalgia: those values had the right feel, and rewriting them from scratch would have meant redoing the entire balance to end up in the same place.

Going from local prototype to online game meant rebuilding everything around that core: a refereeing server, a network protocol, accounts, a ranking, tournaments. The core itself did not change.

Who develops it

The project is developed, hosted and published by Martin Poiroux, a developer trading as a sole proprietorship registered in France. Full publisher details are in the legal notice.

It is an independent project: no publisher, no studio, no team. That explains the update rhythm, and it also explains why the feedback form in the Help menu lands directly with the person who writes the code.

How the game is built

Three technical decisions shape everything else.

The server is authoritative

The match is simulated on the server at a fixed time step, one hundred and twenty times per second. Browsers send intentions — left, right, jump, drop — and receive a game state. No client can decide a score, a ball position or a speed. It is the only architecture that makes a ranking credible.

One physics module, shared

The physics module is the same file on the server and in the browser. The client uses it to predict your own movement, so your controls answer without waiting for the network round trip; the server uses it to referee. Two parallel implementations would have drifted apart at the first tweak, and prediction would have started lying. Offline mode reuses that same module, which is why the feel there is identical.

The network is split in two channels

Reliable events — joining a room, starting a match, confirming a score — travel over a guaranteed connection. The match state stream, however, can take a low-latency channel where a lost packet is not retransmitted: in a game with sixty updates per second, a position two frames old is not worth waiting for, the next one is already arriving.

Accounts, profiles, ranking, quests and the cosmetic inventory sit on a database hosted in the European Union. The website and the game server are hosted in France.

What is there, and what is not

The game is playable and complete at its core: online matches, six bots with a career mode, ELO ranking with tiers and divisions, eight-player tournaments, levels, quests, cosmetics, accounts, public profiles, spectator mode, offline two-player on one keyboard.

What is missing is better said plainly: the player base is still small, which makes ranked queues uneven at quiet hours — the matchmaking window widens quickly precisely to compensate. Some menu sections still read "coming soon". And the game exists only in French and English.

Where to go next

If you are new, the beginner's guide is the right starting point. If you want to understand why your balls fly off at angles, shot techniques explains the contact mechanics in detail. And if you want a short answer to a specific question, try the FAQ.