In a bumping game the hit is the punchline, so players have to read a shot from how hard they touched the ball. Pass chains and speed-up rails both changed that. Shots stopped being readable and both were removed. The rule that came out of it: no mechanic touches how hard a hit sends the ball.

Coin Rush was dull as a race for coins, so it became carry-and-bank: coins stack on your roof, score only through your team's gate and spill on a hard hit. Every mode needs one thing only it has. Glide is still looking for its own.

Eight modes are built and shelved for later updates: Overload, Derby, Hockey, Thin Ice, Hot Spots, Coin Rush, Bowling and Darts. Each has to work with bots in the empty seats, and some broke them. In Overload a kickoff reset threw cars over the net, cars passed through the barrier, and bots shoved the ball along the floor into the net. The last fix changed the mode: a touch on a low ball now pops it up toward the net, for people and bots alike.

I ran a playtest over social media. Most comments were about the camera and the steering. The fixes: half the turning circle, a camera that holds still when the ball is close, and camera angle and stiffness in the settings. Nobody guessed the game was built with AI.

Rocket League is the obvious reference, and the handling says so: boost, jump, flip and air roll, with sizes and speeds taken from published car-soccer numbers. Null Shift goes its own way in two places. Football is one stop on a wheel of modes: the same car pushes rivals off a bowl, plays squash against a wall, plays tag, paints a sphere and slides a puck. And it is built for the couch: one screen, any mix of keyboards and gamepads, no online, rounds of one to five minutes, and a setup room where every pad edits its own column at the same time.

Early on, an arena was a pitch inside a stadium, with a crowd and a painted skyline, the same in every mode. Now each arena is a working industrial site, and the match is played in a glass box in the middle of it. The sites are white and charcoal, with one bold colour pair per place and part numbers and arrows doing the detail. They stand 50 to 150 metres from the play and have no collision, so cars read against them and a match plays the same. All of it is built from code: boxes, bars, lathes and pixel glyphs, merged into one mesh per structure.

Each skyline borrows a landmark from a real structure. Shiftball looks out on a port and launch site, with an assembly building and launch tower after Kennedy's. Ring Out sits in a bowl ringed by four faceted towers. Glide has towers of white balls in pink haze and a cube of nine balls after the Atomium. Rebound is a telecom hill with a ring tower after the BT Tower. Claim's sphere floats over a sky city with a deck after Marina Bay Sands. Marked looks out at stacks after Habitat 67 and the capsules of the Nakagin Capsule Tower.

Three kaits from three fictional makers: the Bolinha by LÜDOS, the Testudo by ACIES and the Hadal by OCEANUS, each in its maker's colours. The concept sheets were generated in the style of tough, fast die-cast toy cars. I modeled the cars by hand in Blender: hard-surface, no smoothing, proportions checked against orthographic renders. A body changes the silhouette and the hitbox, and the handling is the same for all three.

By hand: the art style guide, the arena design standard, the concept board, the three cars in Blender, and the two rules everything runs under: no gameplay mechanic without my yes, and every visual change looked at in a real frame. With AI: the Godot code, the arenas, the bots, the tools, the long tail of fixes and the car concept sheets. The calls on feel, taste and which idea to cut were mine. Tools: Claude Fable, Claude Opus, Cursor, Gemini, Higgsfield, Figma Weave and Figma.

Playable offline on Mac and Windows with bots in all six modes, in Godot 4.7 with Jolt physics, everything including the UI drawn from code. Performance is the current blocker: after the new lighting the game ran at about 20 fps on LOW at 1080p, so floor shadows are now painted from the real geometry at load and the lowest preset keeps them. The open question is what the fun still lacks: heavier hits, rivalries between friends and comebacks.