Monthly Archives: October 2006

USM2 set pieces

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Today I made another importan addition… the “set pieces takers assignment”. Now you can set a predefined player to take any of the following set pieces: free kick from long distance, from short distance, penalty kick and corner kick. At first I thought was a small improvement that I could delay on a later update, then I realized during the match itself, that if you’re playing with the events is essential to be able to select which player must take that important free kick nearby the opponent goalie area…!
You can also choose to leave a value to “default” and the CPU will automatically pick a player for you. But maybe won’t be the best one! otherwise what would be your role in the game, just watch it playing itself!? 🙂

USM2 progresses and Fizzball

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USM2 programming is running at full speed. Yesterday I spent 10h on it! also I just finished a temporary website, you can check it here. The initial release will be in english only, but I put all the texts in an external file so will be (hopefully!) easy to localize it.

Also I’m already planning some updates… I mean I already wrote down some notes on possible new additions. For now main goal is to finish a release candidate 1.0. In games so complex like a soccer management one, you never run out of ideas! but is important to try to release a first version to gather users feedback (most important thing for a developer).

Meanwhile I found very fun the game Fizzball released by the friends developers Grubbygames. Is a very clever and well designed variant of the classic game “arkanoid” or if you prefet “breakout”. Cool comic-style art too. Was a fun diversive for a few hours, then I had to go back working on USM2…! 😉

USM2 match events

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Working like mad on USM2 again. I’m trying to met the deadline of a playable alpha by end of this month, but things are getting bad… I don’t know if I’ll be able to met it 🙁

That is bad, of course I don’t have any boss to respond to, but I have some people that are waiting to play this game since long time (2 years!) so I really want to try to release it soon. But of course, I don’t want either to release it without a proper beta testing…!

Today made the match event menu, soon I’ll post a screenshot. I think looks cool, you can choose what your player should do when there’s an important event in the game. If your great talent is on the edge of the area, what he should do? shoot a powerful shot, a precise shot, lift the ball on the area, or… ? you’ll have maximum 5 choices each one with a related skill involved and a possible percentage of success (depending on the skill value of your player).

I think that even if is just small interaction, should be a nice diversion from the usual automatic matches you see usually in the soccer management games…!

…and the Goalkeeper scores from the corner!

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No wait I didn’t went nutz programming USM2…! is that today I finished an important part of the game. When a new event occurs, the game must pick a reasonable player based on the ball position. If the ball is heading towards the center of opponent penalty box, it needs to pick an attacker, obviously.

But today made a cool change, instead of looking the role of the player, it actually looks at the position on the field (as it should be!) using the grid on the picture below. What it means? that if you want to put Buffon, Barthez, Kahn (or name whatever goalkeeper you want) in the position of Henry, Ronaldo, Toni – you can 🙂 of course don’t expect that they’ll be able to score sensational goals after dribbling two defenders… 😉

tactic grid

Magic stones online stats!

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Today was tired of working on USM2 and also was challenged by my friend patrice to make a sort of “online druid viewer” (lol should copyright that phrase) for my game Magic Stones. For now I just made a temporary page but works already! In the game you can choose to upload your druid stats online, and then you’ll be able to login into a page using your game registration info to personalize it.

I’m still in the initial phase and need some more time, I think I’ll release this new feature in the new version of the game during this Christmas 2006. The biggest problem right now are the artifacts, since they’re randomly generated in the game itself… 😐

I’m having a mad idea… have the artifact “global” and then use the online system to make a sort of “online trading” for artifacts ! hmm well the idea is quite cool I think but I hope doesn’t take too much to be implemented :p