Man Makes a Blaseball Visualizer Using Wii Sports Assets

Blaseball has been an online hit since its launch a few months ago. The strange browser-based text ticker game inspired a community to create lore, art, music, and even a collection of gimmicky spinoff sites. But this might be our favorite: someone made a 3D game visualizer based on Wii Sports.

We're talking about a project by Zac Lucarelli, a indie developer that spent the last month working on a visual representation of the text-based browser game. They even made a video talking about the process.



For those out of the loop, Blaseball is an online browser game where virtual teams composed of virtual players with unique stats participate in a game very similar in rules to real world baseball. What sets it apart is that the rules of the game change every season, introducing reality-defying mechanics and eldritch horrors. Viewers watch the games take place using a virtual ticker that updates every few seconds.

Lucarelli found the traditional ticker format to be a bit boring. He wanted to SEE the game. So he set out to create the Blaseball Visualizer. Using assets from Wii Sports imported into the Unity Engine, the program reads information from the Blaseball website, feeds it into the engine, and recreates the reported events in 3D.

We were lucky enough to talk with Lucarelli about the project. They provided some fascinating insight about the games development:

There was also this kind of unintended side effect I realised after making it is that it kind of adds a bit more suspense to a game when you don't instantly know what kind of play is happening. like you get that feeling of oh crap that ball is outta here is that going to be a home run? oh but it's really high is someone going to catch it? it's kinda cool.

With the evolving nature of Blaseball being part of what makes it unique, we asked what his plans for the future of the project were:

At the moment I'm also not super sure if I want to continue working on this, it was only supposed to be like a fun little side project that ended up taking a lot longer than I expected. It's hard to justify putting so much time and effort into something that could really just be DMCA'd by [Nintendo] at any time.

This is an understandable position to take, given the amount of effort that game development takes. Lucarelli has their own independent projects to focus on, after all.

While this is a fantastic way to watch Blaseball, we won't be seeing any live games for a while. The site has announced a month long siesta, where the game will be suspended while they work on implementing new features and mechanics. As a result, there won't be any live games for the Visualizer to display. And when the game does come back online, there's no guarantee that it won't introduce a new element that might conflict with the visualizer.

You can download the visualizer for yourself via this Reddit post. Meanwhile, Zac Lucarelli is currently working on their own game, Duck with a Gun. You can follow Lucarelli and his game's development on his Twitter account.