Football Drama Is Live

Going live with Football Drama was our first time in publishing a commercial game, so it was also very important.

Football Drama went live on September 18, in 8 languages (EN IT DE FR ES PT ZH RU) on these platforms:

Google Play (Android), App Store (iOS) (also Mac App Store), Steam.

Football Drama has been built by these guys:

Football Drama Development Team

From left to right: Daniele Giardini “Demigiant”, Pino Panzarella “Pugusel”, Marta Ascari “Ascari”, Pietro Polsinelli “Punkard”, Matteo Bicocchi “Pupunzi”.

And Football Drama is maintained and promoted with the help of Laura Mirri and Daniela Calogiuri. We also got an amazing launch PR from Charlene Lebrun and her Player Two PR.

To celebrate the release, once on sale on the stores we started streaming gameplay and chat with game designer friends, here is the video:

And here are all the guests:

We Are Muesli.

wearem

Daniele Giardini “Demigiant”

daniele1

Konstantinos Dimopoulos

kostas

Yonder.

yonder

Marta Ascari “Ascari”.

marta

Because of a mistake on our part, we didn’t make it in chatting with Florent Maurin – but fortunately, I had a chance to discuss Football Drama and narrative games with him a few days before. Here you see him playing our dear game :-)

Florent Maurin

In the chat we referred to the research done for Football Drama, here is a video that has many of the references:

And the world cup posters:

World cup posters

This was also an opportunity to try to make the application more visible, and for this, we had the great help of Caterina Chimenti “Kikaweb”.

So dear all, we made it, we released it: also thanks to you. THANK YOU.

 

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Football Drama: new trailer, inching closer to beta

We just published a new Football Drama trailer on Steam and Youtube.

In the last few months, we have improved Football Drama along several dimensions:

– Mechanics: The card element of the gameplay has been clarified and “card explanations” are always available. The “why” of success and failure of actions during matches is always available (as a big circle in the field) for more “technical” players, so adapting to more diverse styles of gameplay.

– Dialogues: More elements of the gameplay have become dialogues and hence have been expanded, like the “handshakegate” section and the press meetings. For all dialogues, we developed a set of tools for their direction (see this post: ) so that we added balloon styles, comic-styled layouts and even animations (see the I-Ching dialogue series).

– Matches: all parts of the matches have been improved with more animations and feedback. Goals have spectacular animations associated, cards rotate showing explanations… .

– Plot: the central part of the plot has been created, with several new dialogues and circumstances. All the plotting for and against the Thiefa League president (Septic Splatter) is in place.

What is missing is the bridge between the central part of the plot (around weeks 8-12 of the championship) and all the possible endings, some of which are ready and some not. Also we want to refine the opponent’ manager AI and personality, and make the recurring stages (like press meeting) less repetitive in contents. This is the last effort towards the game reaching beta stage which is hence quite close.

So add Football Drama to your Steam wishlist or subscribe to the release mail!

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Designing More Charming Game Dialogues

Here is a Gamasutra post Direction Tools For Your Game’s Dialogues and a new video

where we present several ideas for improving a game’s dialogue user interfaces. Hope these examples are useful :-)

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Why Humans Love Football?

In this video, we bring you on a journey through football and its surrounding universe and stories. In a trip through novels, poems, movies we meditate and wonder about football’s nature.

This exploration is a way to explain why we believe that football is an interesting subject for a narrative game, which we are indeed developing (Football Drama).

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Football Drama: a playable version ready for Milan Games Week

Football Drama is a narrative / managerial game of Football currently in advanced development. We are presenting a playable version of the first part of the game at Milan Games Week (October 5-7, 2018) at the indie booth. For this event we completed development of many parts of the game, and released some supporting material and media. Some of the work done:

A new game play video – so that everyone can see the game at its current state of development, not just the Milan visitors:

T-shirts: we will bring our printed ones and also have a shop online:

Football Drama t-shirt

We updated our “Steam capsule”, see before and after:

Football Drama old capsule

New Football Drama capsule

Created paper cards and booth presentation:

Football Drama booth background

We have many new beautiful cards for the game, see this gallery.

We also set up an Instagram channel with Football Drama illustrations.

Football Drama Instagram

Soooo… add Football Drama to your Steam Wishlist or subscribe the release list!

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Football Drama: our first own game is coming!

A football game about poets & crooks

A football game with a real narrative? That navigates the composite universe of football, poetry, sweat, bad management and nonsense? Yes, it’s coming: called Football Drama, here is the “Choices” teaser:

And subscribe by mail or or follow on Discord or add to your Steam wishlist or follow on Twitter or subscribe on YouTube or… just forget it 😀

Will be playable on phones and desktops.

Curious how this game came about? Here is a long interview with its game designer.

Fossball Drama

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Museum Digital Transformation: Talk And Workshop Materials

Museums are research institutions that often have a multi dimensional mission: research, preserve, teach, communicate. Digital tools can sometimes help in maintaining this mission: how and when has been the topic of the conference and set of workshops Museum Digital Transformation held in Florence on the 12th and 13th of April 2018.

I both had a talk (together with Alice Filipponi) and taught a workshop. Here you find links to all the slides and supporting materials I used.

Talk: Museums And Learning

Slides of the talk Museums and Learning – an open dialogue through digital transformation:

Here are two videos presented during the talk:

Workshop: Designing An Applied Game For Your Museum

Workshop exercise booklet

Slides of the workshop:

And here is a public link to a folder with supporting materials.

Thanks!

I hope this material can be helpful. I wish to thank Alice Filipponi, Francesco Pallanti, Pino Panzarella and Matteo Bicocchi without whom these projects and events would not have been possible.

As a way to keep in contact I publish every month or two a newsletter with new research on applied games. You can subscribe here. :-)

 

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Getting Google Sheet Data Updates In Unity

Separating data from Unity code is one of the main ways to keep your project maintainable and resistant to change. Anyone who has experience in game development knows how quick iteration in a constantly changing universe is a necessary part of the process.

(Yes, you are the cat.)

In case your game has a substantial narrative part, facilitating writer/developer interaction is also very important; I was reminded how common is this need by a recent interview of Leigh Alexander The Most Important Part Of Writing A Video Game Is The Tools, on her writing experience for Reigns: Her Majesty.

Writing for games has specific needs and contexts (see a detailed post of mine Videogame Dialogues: Writing Tools And Design Ideas), and so its important for the writer and the developers to quickly see how the text appears in the context of gameplay.

Supposing your writer is updating a Google sheet, I provide you with a very simple way to automatically get an updated textual asset at each Unity run, so making it easy to check how it feels in game.

The solution is simple as Google lets you download any shared doc in CSV format by just requesting the correct URL; you can also specify a target sheet in a multi-sheet document. What is a little bit tricky is that whenever your writer is using newlines, commas or quotation marks, this may break the CSV format.

What is cool of the solution is that it creates a textual asset of the downloaded content, so that say as long as you are running in Unity’s editor, you download the updates, but as soon as you build, the app will use the asset.

You find a complete solution as a Gist on Github :-)

Follow me on Twitter where I post about game design, game development, Unity3d, applied / serious games.

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How to get “share on social” in Unity

I’m writing this post because a reference solution for how to create a Unity button that allows to “share on social” text and images, opening the default “pick a social” screen on mobile apps does not seem to be sufficiently indexed, so my colleague Matteo Bicocchi and I had to struggle in order to put together a complete solution. Here I just re-post information we found elsewhere (in different posts) together with a linear procedure, so I hope to save time for some of you reading :-)

90% of the solution is simply getting this library unity-native-sharing from GitHub and following its setup instructions, in our case the only resulting call is:

NativeShare.Share(I18n.T("SHARE_GRAFFITI_BODY"), mediaPath, null, 
  I18n.T("SHARE_GRAFFITI_SUBJECT"), "image/jpg");

Before finding this simple solution we went through a nightmarish set of experiments that half worked, Android manifest conflicts and Android Studio bizzarries, all stuff that using the above plugin will spare you.

The only case the plugin doesn’t cover is this: on IOS, Instagram by default does not appear among the apps with which you can share your image (it does by default on Android). But the integration to get also Instagram is below.

Share from Unity to social on mobile

Special handling for sharing to Instagram on IOS

For solving the Instagram case we used an additional “plugin” that you can deploy together with the one above; it is just a header and implementation (2 files) and a bridge call from Unity, of the kind

  if (Application.platform == RuntimePlatform.IPhonePlayer)
  {
    InstagramShare.PostToInstagram(I18n.T("SHARE_GRAFFITI_SUBJECT"), 
      LocalScreenshot.EncodeToPNG());
  }
  else
  {
    NativeShare.Share(I18n.T("SHARE_GRAFFITI_BODY"), mediaPath, null, 
      I18n.T("SHARE_GRAFFITI_SUBJECT"), "image/jpg");
  }

Now this will still not work by default (you will be warned by XCode on run) because of a permission problem:

canOpenURL: failed for URL: “instagram://app” – error: “This app is not allowed to query for scheme instagram”

Again here is the solution, which is to edit the plist file in XCode. And below there is how to automate the plist change from Unity: put this code in a class saved in an Editor folder:

 [PostProcessBuild]
 public static void ChangeXcodePlist(BuildTarget buildTarget, 
   string pathToBuiltProject)
    {
        if (buildTarget == BuildTarget.iOS)
        {
           [... other changes ...]

            // Change value of CFBundleVersion in Xcode plist
            PlistElementArray array = 
              rootDict.CreateArray("LSApplicationQueriesSchemes");
            array.AddString("instagram");           

            // Write to file
            File.WriteAllText(plistPath, plist.WriteToString());
        }
    }

That’s all. So thank you so much to the solvers of the three problems above, and you should now have a complete solution. :-)

Follow me on Twitter where I post about game design, game development, Unity3d, applied / serious games.

 

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My Games Of The Year 2017

With Daniele Giardini we wrote our GOTY lists here. They are almost totally disjoint! 😀

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