Motumbo

About the game

Motumbo is a sumo match played by balls. Up to eight of them start on a floating arena made of tiles, and the tiles begin to fall away after a while, so the space gets smaller and the pushing gets harder. You shove the others, you dash into them, you jump over a gap, and anyone who rolls off the edge is out of the round. The last ball standing wins, and the first to three, five or seven rounds takes the match.

The balls have weight and inertia, so the whole game is about timing. A dash hits much harder than a plain bump, a jump can save you from a hole, and the anchor stops you dead on the spot: if you press it just before a rival's dash lands, you parry it. Golden and coloured orbs appear on the arena and give a power-up: a stronger next dash, a burst of speed, a bigger and heavier ball, a shield against the next shove, a bomb that pushes everyone away, a magnet, a freeze on the nearest rival or a spring for a super jump.

There are more than eighty arenas, from a plain classic floor to rings, bridges, pyramids, a volcano and big towers, plus four modes: Sumo, King of the Hill (stay alone in the zone to score), Harvest (collect the orbs first) and Cursed (pass the curse on before it explodes). The map editor lets you draw your own arena tile by tile, raise towers up to fifteen levels high and test it at once. Winning matches and rounds unlocks new ball skins, from flags to patterns and materials like gold, chrome and lava.

Everything in the game is made of code. The physics and all the game rules are a single C program compiled to WebAssembly, on top of the Box3D physics engine, and the music, the sounds, the textures and the sky are generated while the game runs. The author wrote it with the help of an AI assistant.

Playing it here

Click Play. The title screen has a quick match against bots, which is the fastest way to start, and a custom game screen to choose the arena, the mode, the number of bots and their level, or to play a friend on the same keyboard. The online mode of the original game, which needs servers, is removed from this version, and the interface was translated from Spanish to English. Your name, ball, unlocked skins, settings and maps are saved in this browser.

Controls

Tips

Brake before the edge. The ball keeps rolling; let go of the key early or use the anchor.

Dash at the right moment. A dash from far away is easy to dodge. Wait until a rival is close and busy.

Take the orbs, but not at any price. A shield or a bomb can decide a round, and the golden orb makes your next dash much stronger.

FAQ

Can I play online with friends? Not in this version: the original has an online mode that needs outside servers, and it was removed. You can play against bots or share a keyboard with a friend.

Is it available in other languages? The game is in English here; it was written in Spanish and translated.

Is it a finished game? It is a complete small game with a lot of content, made by one person with the help of an AI assistant, and it is updated by its author.

Credits and licence

Motumbo was made by axelromero99 and is released under the MIT licence. The physics are done by Box3D, by Erin Catto (MIT), and the scene is drawn with the three.js library (MIT). In this version we removed the online play, translated the interface to English and added a security policy that blocks any network request outside the page. The licence texts, the source of the game and of Box3D, the changes and the build script are linked from this page.