Thanks for the feedback! You've absolutely hit on a few things that I'm not satisfied with in this release (although I'm still quite happy with what I put out for the time frame).
You're right the hitbox is in front of you. In volleyball you put your hands out in front of you together and form what is called your "platform". Basically you want the ball to bounce off your forearms, which you make as flat as possible. I didn't communicate this very well in the game, for sure. Also your character makes the platform and bumps/receives/digs the ball automatically, you don't need to push any button, just be in the right spot with the right timing. I didn't go into much detail w/ instruction because I didn't want to bombard unfamiliar players with volleyball terminology or make the game seem complicated, but all of this definitely needs to be clearer.
On the second point, I fully agree, there's no way to really predict which spike the opponent will use. They have 3 spikes, a forceful downward one that will hit in the front court (this one is deadly!) a fairly light middle hit and one that will *just* hit the back of the court, assuming the opponent's positioning is right. The first and third are very hard to dig, you basically have to choose a position and hope you're right in this current version. In a future version I will try to give some kind of brief indicator, or find another solution. For example in this version of the game, only your player character can receive/dig the ball (receiving is what you call when you bump a serve btw, otherwise it is called a dig) but in a future version I'd like to have the game more fleshed out, with a teammate that can do more than just set for you (setting is when you overhand the ball to your teammate to spike).
In a theoretical expanded version of this game, I'd have some nice tutorialization of what you're supposed to do, what the basic terminology is, etc. My hope was that by keeping things simple/automatic enough, players would figure out some of the finer details of the game on their own in a few minutes-- I think this mostly works but is not perfect obviously.
Apologies for the essay-length response haha! thanks again for playing & for the feedback