Author Archives: admin

PES6 first impressions!

Leave a reply

Yeah I know… I should work on USM2 😀

And indeed I’m working on it, I swear! yesterday night finally passed another great milestone – played a complete match, everything went fine, player ratings, realistic results and events, etc.

But the “problem” is that today got my copy of PES6 fresh from the oven ! So I MUST play it for a while. I just played for a few hours and those are my first impressions:

  • realism: the game got even better! the dribblings feel much more realistic – more varied, not always the same sidestep as previous version, there are more casual rebounds like in real soccer
  • goalkeeper finally can lose control of the ball when saving: before either they were saving, or they were putting on corner kick. Now they can even just punch the ball, that will remain dangerously in the penalty area!
  • conterattacks! yeah! finally a true counterattack! Was the 89′ minute, my team winning 1-0 and the opponent all pressing forward during a corner kick, I manage to steal the ball and launch a solitary player. I went one on one vs the opponent GK and scored! such situations never happened before (there were always some defenders around!)
  • air play – the headers, the contrast were also greatly improved. Even here, the word is “randomness”. Of course having a big tall guy can have you get almost all the passes, but for other cases there’s much more variety of touches and situations.

In one word: this new version rulez, way better than the previous one that was a little disappointing!

mind of the married man

Leave a reply

That tv-movie is quite cool, I watch it every week here on pay-tv. It does talk well about married men problems. I’m not married but recently I saw so many discussion about relationships etc. I can only give you my honest opinion from the indie-developer point of view. If you want to ask yourself, what is the best situation to be indie? there’s no doubt about the reply: the best condition is to be single or at least not living together.

Why? there are tons of factors. Here’s a brief list:

  • if you are engaged, you will have bad moment and discussions (if you know a couple that never has problems let me know, I’m curious to meet them). Does I need to tell you that programming (concentrating) in such moment is impossible? so if you’re angry for 2-3 days, in those 2-3 days you won’t work
  • if you are engaged, you’ll have to listen to partner’s wishes. Don’t tell me that you always do what you want! that’s not true. you can’t ignore all the partner’s requests. If he/she wants to go out tonight, or go to last concert or … anything else, you’ll have to accept them, and organize your work… maybe when you are in a good productivity moment. People don’t realize that being indie, is more similar to being an artist – than a database programmer. Speaking with many successful developers they really “got insipiration” in particular moments and that can really make the difference from a topseller to an average game.
  • being indie is really a particular job. People think is fine not to break balls if you’re in a office, but if you work at home (or the home is your office) then voilà , doesn’t count. Like they are entitle to distract you every possible way (if you live together).
  • being indie means also dealing with bad periods. There can be moments where sales stagnate, and what will happen usually? unless your partner understand you well, he/she will complain about it and maybe the classic phrase will get out “why don’t you get a regular job?”.

Ok I think is enough – there are many more possibilities. Living in same house 24/24 can be very stressing if you’re indie! I’ve warned you 😉

USM2 set pieces

Leave a reply

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

Leave a reply

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

Leave a reply

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…!