So here's a project I've been working on for almost 3 years.
Initially it was called Football Live 2008 and was supposed to be released by the Euro 2008, but back then we didn't feel the game was good enough to be presented to the publisher that was supposed to publish it at the time.
Time went by and we kept working on it, eventually changing the name to Football Live 2009. In the meanwhile, the publisher went under and when I started working on A Man With a Monocle I decided to put Football Live on ice so that I wouldn't have to focus on two different projects. Now that it's done and released, Football Live is huh...alive again !
Back in early 2008, even before we got publisher interest, we started working on a alternative version of the game for the Caiman.us contest with crocodiles instead of human players, and called Caiman Soccer. It won the contest, and is pretty much everywhere on the internet but honestly it's not very good.
You may try it out here:
http://neogen2.com/cs.html
Now on the game itself (ripped from the game's page):
Football Live 2009 is a soccer/football game inspired by the original Kick Off as well as the Sensible Soccer series.
Our objective is to retain what made these games so especial such the feeling of actually being in control of the game, with modern tecnology and plenty of new and exciting additions.
Here's a trailer with some game footage on.
I expect to release the game this year, probably by the end of the year.
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Right now the game is complete and technically ready for launch, but I want to hear some more feedback on the beta and fine tune everything until I feel it's 100% complete.
After all it took me 3 years to finish this thing, it would be just stupid to blow it all in the end.
I think a realistic release date would be next week or in two weeks. However knowing myself I will only be sure the day before the release.
Since I don't have much else to say, here's a random screenshot:
After all the delays, the best testing phase has finally begun with all the beta testers receiving their copies within the next minutes.
If you are a beta tester and you haven't received the email, please let me know.
Lately work on the game has been mostly about research and working on the database, while giving the career mode's last touches.
The game now has a new tournaments mode where you can participate in some well known tournament such as the world cup.
We are also thinking about a new game mode called Scenario where you start matches right in the middle or the end in various conditions, for example, being down to 10 players, losing 2-0 etc and where you have to either win or avoid a defeat, depending on the objectives of the scenario.
Each of these matches will have a background story, I also want these matches to be based on real ones, such as the recent 5-0 win by barcelona against real madrid for example.
Even though I haven't posted a devlog in a long time, this doesn't mean I haven't been working on the game regularly, on the contrary.
These last weeks have been mostly about me hitting my head against the wall because of the multiplayer. So far it's been a huge waste of time trying to remodel most of the code in order to make it possible for me to allow two players playing in the same pc.
I had really bad programming habits 3 years ago when I started this project and it shows now, making it almost impossible for me to make multiplayer a reality.
Unless I find a good solution which so far I haven't found, having a offline multiplayer game mode is pretty much impossible with me rewriting about 80% of the entire code.
This is a daunting task, specially if you consider the fact that it took me 3 years to reach this stage, the main code (not counting the database code) being exactly 26 843 lines long, a number that will increase as the game is not entirely finished yet.
On the good side, in the likely scenario that Football Live is released without multiplayer, the price will be significantly lower to what I initially planned.
Other than the multiplayer, I've been working on improving the other aspects of the game.
The AI of the goalkeepers has been improved, they now cover their goals much more efficiently, making it much more difficult to score with long range shots.
The after touch (or shoot bending) has been largely reworked and it's now possible to score some really satisfying goals, but it can also be used for crosses and long range passes.
The size of the goals has also be been increased both in width and height.
All this doesn't necessarily mean more goals because the AI of the goalkeepers has also been improved, but it does mean it's now impossible to exploit the AI's shortcomings to score easy goals.
They can make mistakes from which the forwards can take profit from, just like in real life, but those aren't programming errors and only happen from time to time, depending on the goalkeepers stats. i.e a weak goalkeeper will be more prone to errors while a good goalkeeper is usually more solid and will make the forwards's job a lot harder.
Well that's all for now
(If you're a tester, expect the next and final beta testing phase to begin soon, probably by next week. If you are not available during that time please let me know )
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So here's a project I've been working on for almost 3 years.
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