Creating a new football game!

broxopios

broxopios

CarrollsGarden
14 February 2004
Greece
AEK Athens
Hi all.

In this site we have many programmers and football lovers (like jenkey or juce and many more). So my curiosity is why don't you guys cooperate and create an independent football game focused on gameplay and AI? Espacially today where independent games are so popular and the same time fifa and pes do not offer much in these vital aspects.

If i were a programmer i'd definitely make a try.
 
Games don't happen in basements anymore. It takes large resources and intrepid personalities to get games to market now.
 
:LOL:

Trying to write game from scratch? You need fundaments to base on (wasn't there a guy doing football game around here already? With working code?).

Then you hit a block you cannot get past and need... Help from a lot of other people (animations, graphics, modelling, not speaking of audio and testers). You need MONEY. Your choice if it hits some fancy from people would be to use kickstarter platform to raise money to start project. (Planescape Torment Sequel needed 1mln dollars to even start working on it :P).

It's not like people can't create games like Prince of Persia anymore xD. (as Android/WP/iPhone platform shows it can be done by 1 person).

The problem is... People have expectations nowadays which need to be fulfilled. :D
 
Ipswich69 said:
Games don't happen in basements anymore. It takes large resources and intrepid personalities to get games to market now.
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Yes because i believe they invest on perfect visual/graphics that needs large resources as you said. Out there are independent games that have made from one or few people.


pboreham said:
Didnt you post this exact same post a year or two ago? literally word for word?
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No. What i posted, was an independent football game that it is under developement by Baz. The only negative on this project is that Baz is the only person who develop the game and we will need months or years to finally play his game.

This is the link m8 http://www.evo-web.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=67592

I know it's not easy to create a football game from the beginning. I've just got tired rely on pes 5/6 every year. I need a fresh new game. Who knows, maybe fifa 15 or pes 2015 give something special.
 
Creating a game is impossible in my opinion...but, creating a mod that used PES6 engine perhaps would be realistic. I mean something like Sensible Soccer, independent from the game (would only launch it) where you didn't have team limitation, you could have a proper career, transfers, etc. That I think it could be possible and would give PES 6 a whole new interest.
 
Lami said:
There's Pure Football if you want a change.
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borat.gif
 
Games grow on basements more than ever before. Indie games from teams with less than 5 people can be mistaken for AAA ones.

However, the kind of effort necessary is not something you'll find on a fan forum. There may be some motivation, but it's not enough.
 
Lami said:
There's Pure Football if you want a change.
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No it's yours Lami. I don't want to deprive your favorite game :)


_anderson said:
Games grow on basements more than ever before. Indie games from teams with less than 5 people can be mistaken for AAA ones.

However, the kind of effort necessary is not something you'll find on a fan forum. There may be some motivation, but it's not enough.
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Yeah i hear you and i thing the truth is somewhere there. But i know that a lot of people will applaud a worthwhile independent football game. Focused on gameplay, AI, physics, strategies and an addictive with depth career mode such as football manager.

Yes i know that AAA graphics, dynamic weather, licences etc is fine, but can you play a game with those elements but with mediocre gameplay?
 
The problem with sports games nowadays are the high prices of the licenses. I am sure that most of any sports game budget is spent on yearly licenses because the games with no licenses simply don't sell. That basically kills any serious attempt of a new big sports title in the market.
 
_anderson said:
Games grow on basements more than ever before. Indie games from teams with less than 5 people can be mistaken for AAA ones.

However, the kind of effort necessary is not something you'll find on a fan forum. There may be some motivation, but it's not enough.
Click to expand...

This is not true for sports games. You can do a nice little game through an indy studio, or something very specific, maybe even with lot of content in it and probably using engines and tools that are very fitting to your idea.

But sports games are a very different beast, you need a hell of a lot of developments that you will have to do on your own, a lot of stuff that will require a lot of money (motion capturing thousands of animations, for example), a lot of AI development that sports games companies have been developing for years, programming your own animation blending engine with inverted kinetics driven animations, devleoping all the contact stuff, ball physics, etc... You would need so many people and so much time that in fact what you require is a big company to operate properly.

Licenses, marketing, graphics, game UI, modes, contents... all that would be additional development.

It's automatically out of the question for amateurs or an indy company if you want to do a game that can compete at a decent level at the pitch (not even considering multiplayer, etc... just the basic gameplay). If you are talking about something as basic as sensible soccer or the first couple of pes games... then just play them in your PC or passed-gen console.

PS: I'm setting up a studio myself here at Barcelona and soon recruiting people to work on a console game project, so I know a bit what I'm talking about from a production perspective ;)
 
I disagree, and that's why I talked about effort and motivation.

It's the same with every game, there's always money you'll have to spend in licensing and equipment/software, the main difference on indie programming is always on what you pay yourself/your devs for the amount of work you do (which is usually 0 until there's a profit). You'll never have the luxury to delegate every feature to big teams of devs, that doesn't make it impossible, just more time consuming.

There's low cost solutions for nearly everything you mentioned (except actual football licenses), there's engines that already do a great deal of the complex mechanics regarding physics and animations, and even if they're not ideal, custom-built ones are not that rare (the 1 man effort inspired by PES6 that was posted here before, GameplayFootball, had all those built from scratch, in a very ingenious way too, especially the animation system).

It's obviously not reasonable to expect something on the level of complexity of PES/FIFA right from the start, but if the focus is gameplay and there's a constant effort on improving everything else, it's just wrong to say it's "impossible".
 
I think that nowdays people expect just too much from sport games. This is one of the reason that prevents indie to create sport games. For example all people more or less moan about licenses or animations or anything not gameplay related. Everyone says "for me gameplay is the most important thing" but then if in a soccer game there are not enough teams licensed, for them the game sucks. Same applies for animations. I am truly fed up to read comments like "animations of this game looks so unnatural, so robotic that I can't literally play it!!! What the developers where thinking!!!".
Be aware that I am not saying I am better than others, because for example I am a career whore. I long dreamed for a Pes with a very deep career mode like football manager, even better if I can play as a single player like in Become a Legend. I love pes 2014 gameplay, it took me really a lot to get used to it but now I am finally enjoying it, even at top player level, without noticing too many strange things. Sometimes I felt I could not win a specific match, but only when I was still trying to learn how to defend and how to properly build up my attacks. Of course there will always be moments in which my topscorer hits to post 3 times in a match, i get 70% of ball possession, 20 shoots on targets and yet the cpu wins 1-0. It was there from the first ever football game with a decent CPU processing all the shit that can happen in a match. Its just normal.
To summarize my point of view, there wont be any indie soccer game that really satisfy the mass, because simply noone (or almost noone) will play a soccer game that has no licences (once again me included). Lets face it, is there any of you that plays a old version of pes with outdated rosters and stats? Even pes 5 and pes 6 lovers keep updating the game with the up to date rosters, kits, emblems and all.
You may think that maybe the solution is to make a game with no licenses at all, but with a powerful editor to put inside anything we want, but once again I am quite sure that big software house like EA and even KONAMI would find a wait to make that game illegal, because the spend a lot of money in licenses. One more problem is the time to update a game. For example I tried many times to update pes 3, one of my fav in the series. But all alone I got always bored after a while, because nowdays rosters change every 6 months thanks to the shitty transfer market system we have nowdays. I can't even finish to update national teams that some players retire from the national teams or there is a continental cup that changes rosters completely.
Now imagine updating a indie game without license all by ourself. We would get bored after a couple of leagues, in the best case.

Once last thing to say is that I am also learning how to program. To be precise I am programming in DarkBASIC, and exactly to make my own soccer game, with cartoonish 3d players similar to the indie game "new star soccer 2010". I loved that game but it was full of bugs in the menu and in the way the CPU calculated schedules. Will I ever finish it? Probably no. Will I have fun trying? Surely yes. Today I celebrated like Maradona in the second goal against England in the 1986 world cup only cause I managed to create a working "press any key" button anymation that appear and disappear on screen :D
 
ZeroTheHero said:
Sure, that's why the indie market is at an all time high I suppose... oh wait...
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Even indie games aren't happening in basements. The word indie gets thrown around now like other trendy phrases such as organic, free range and hand stirred.
 
vihn78 said:
Will I ever finish it? Probably no. Will I have fun trying? Surely yes. Today I celebrated like Maradona in the second goal against England in the 1986 world cup only cause I managed to create a working "press any key" button anymation that appear and disappear on screen :D
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Haha. The experience is truly satisfying. Success after hard work feels so good like you've invented something hehe.
 
Ipswich69 said:
Even indie games aren't happening in basements. The word indie gets thrown around now like other trendy phrases such as organic, free range and hand stirred.
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Indie never was supposed to be a synonym for "basement made". Independent games are low budget wares made by one, two, three and so on... even three thousand people, doesn't matter. Looking at the market at the moment, there are only a few games that get promoted aggressively and have a huge team backing.

FYI I never had a computer hooked up in the basement so by definition none of the progs and tools / mods I've made are made in the basement...
 
vihn78 said:
For example all people more or less moan about licenses or animations or anything not gameplay related. Everyone says "for me gameplay is the most important thing" but then if in a soccer game there are not enough teams licensed, for them the game sucks. Same applies for animations. I am truly fed up to read comments like "animations of this game looks so unnatural, so robotic that I can't literally play it!!! What the developers where thinking
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Are you serious about the animations not being part of gameplay ?!
Dude you seem to know nothing about how gameplay works.Imagine there was no crossing animation the how on earth crossing in gameplay works without showing the animation on screen!! :FAIL:
 
Nobleknight said:
Are you serious about the animations not being part of gameplay ?!
Dude you seem to know nothing about how gameplay works.Imagine there was no crossing animation the how on earth crossing in gameplay works without showing the animation on screen!! :FAIL:
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First of all I perfectly know what animations are made for. Second you don't need to criticize me with that fail emoticon like if you are the absolute expert.
Who knows me on this website knows that when I speak about people complaining about animations I mean that people overlook them. Here we are not speaking about an animation missing. Its about the old fun. Most of old games in the early 8 bit generation of computers (and also consoles) had just a bunch of pixels that created the illusion of animations. There was no overhead kick, no crossing animation, sometimes there wasnt even a real ball, just a dot that represented the ball, but yet those games were more or less like a drug, additive. There were also shitty soccer games of course. Nowdays with 3d games it seems that everyone knows everything about animation, that everyone knows better than programmers how animations should work, you included.
When I play a soccer game aganist a friend and score a screamer leaving him crying for losing once again, I don't even notice if the player moved correctly, if he did the correct animation, if there were any unwanted polygon collision between my player and the defender, if the feet was too much planted inside the grass or any other thing that people can moan about. I notice just one thing: I SCORED and I had a lot of fun doing it.
Sometimes here seems that people play games only to check for those "mistakes" and come here saying "hey I found this, it is unacceptable"
You speak about the importance of animations and how much I seem to not know how important they are. Well, if there is one thing I have learned while learning how to code is that no matter how perfect your code is, there will be always some bug happening. This happens with every program, every game, and every other thing you can come up that needs coding. A friend of mine that introduced me to coding told me that when someone asks him how long it takes to program an app he replies that "it needs a certain amount of months to code it, depending on how complex the application will be, then some more months to clean the code and make it more stable and fast processing, and then a hell of eternity to remove the bugs, specially when we speak about thousands of lines of code that sometimes even the programmer himself finds hard to read after a couple of weeks already".

But what can I say, you think I fail because for me is more fun to play a game that replicate well the football experience instead of a state of the art game that feels empty? It's your opinion, and I respect it, but please respect others opinion too before to say so easly that they failed
 
vihn78 said:
First of all I perfectly know what animations are made for. Second you don't need to criticize me with that fail emoticon like if you are the absolute expert.
Who knows me on this website knows that when I speak about people complaining about animations I mean that people overlook them. Here we are not speaking about an animation missing. Its about the old fun. Most of old games in the early 8 bit generation of computers (and also consoles) had just a bunch of pixels that created the illusion of animations. There was no overhead kick, no crossing animation, sometimes there wasnt even a real ball, just a dot that represented the ball, but yet those games were more or less like a drug, additive. There were also shitty soccer games of course. Nowdays with 3d games it seems that everyone knows everything about animation, that everyone knows better than programmers how animations should work, you included.
When I play a soccer game aganist a friend and score a screamer leaving him crying for losing once again, I don't even notice if the player moved correctly, if he did the correct animation, if there were any unwanted polygon collision between my player and the defender, if the feet was too much planted inside the grass or any other thing that people can moan about. I notice just one thing: I SCORED and I had a lot of fun doing it.
Sometimes here seems that people play games only to check for those "mistakes" and come here saying "hey I found this, it is unacceptable"
You speak about the importance of animations and how much I seem to not know how important they are. Well, if there is one thing I have learned while learning how to code is that no matter how perfect your code is, there will be always some bug happening. This happens with every program, every game, and every other thing you can come up that needs coding. A friend of mine that introduced me to coding told me that when someone asks him how long it takes to program an app he replies that "it needs a certain amount of months to code it, depending on how complex the application will be, then some more months to clean the code and make it more stable and fast processing, and then a hell of eternity to remove the bugs, specially when we speak about thousands of lines of code that sometimes even the programmer himself finds hard to read after a couple of weeks already".

But what can I say, you think I fail because for me is more fun to play a game that replicate well the football experience instead of a state of the art game that feels empty? It's your opinion, and I respect it, but please respect others opinion too before to say so easly that they failed
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First of all I didn't mean to disrespect you.That emoticon was about the famous argument that most PES fans tell them selves when they talk about the game.Like "Gameplay is fundemental" and all that made up crap.
I'm not an expert or anything but you can't compare 8 bit to 1080p or ultra HD era.In the past there was no complex physics or high quality graphics.So you didn't have to worry about wrong animation or unrealistic one.
The world of gaming has changed and of course you know that.With all the advancements we have ,there are loads of bugs that will take "god knows" how long to fix.And the introduction of patches that used an excuse to release unfinished titles "PES,BF4!!"

Back to the indie topic,It's more difficult to make a complex game like football with a small group of dev.Just look at Konami,they aren't indie and yet they keep acting like one. ;)
 
Nobleknight said:
First of all I didn't mean to disrespect you.That emoticon was about the famous argument that most PES fans tell them selves when they talk about the game.Like "Gameplay is fundemental" and all that made up crap.
I'm not an expert or anything but you can't compare 8 bit to 1080p or ultra HD era.In the past there was no complex physics or high quality graphics.So you didn't have to worry about wrong animation or unrealistic one.
The world of gaming has changed and of course you know that.With all the advancements we have ,there are loads of bugs that will take "god knows" how long to fix.And the introduction of patches that used an excuse to release unfinished titles "PES,BF4!!"

Back to the indie topic,It's more difficult to make a complex game like football with a small group of dev.Just look at Konami,they aren't indie and yet they keep acting like one. ;)
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Well, In this I must totally agree :) Konami should start to hire more people.
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1J-kQ9M_MSY

Just for fun this is the main menu of the soccer game I am creating. All graphics are just place holders, for me is more important to make the menu actually stable and working properly. Only much much later I will start to seriously work at the menu graphics. There is no actual gameplay footage because there is no actual game made, what you see on screen is what I did till now, but considering I started to learn how to code just a week or so ago, its not so bad :D
 
I can see forum talent and resources building a rudimentary city builder. A complex and expensive game to compete with FIFA and PES, not so much.
 
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