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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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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Games Need Depth: My Research on Football

I’ve just published a post on Gamasutra with some reflections and sources on creating depth in games via narrative research, and how I am trying to do that on Football Voodoom.

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Varieties of Game Applications

Can you use the pervasive media “videogame”  and this field’s design techniques for communicating effectively with people? Can games be used for what you have in mind? How can a field specialist work effectively with a game development team to communicate know how more effectively? [Read more…]

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Developing Storyteller – DAG pod 14

Storyteller game siteIn this episode of the Design a Game podcast we are with Daniel Benmergui who is an independent videogame maker whom many are following in his progress on Storyteller:

Storyteller is a puzzle game where you build visual stories by placing characters and props into a comic-like sequence of frames.

The podcast:
Design a Game podcast: Storyteller

Storyteller site is here.

Ernesto the RPG

Daniel’s RPG game on Kongregate Daniel talks about: Ernesto the RPG.

Works and authors we quoted: Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale, Undestanding Comics, Chris Crawford.

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10 different books game designers could read

I was recently made temporarily unhappy by reading 10 books every gamer should read from The Guardian.

Apart from the misleading title, the article is sort of ok in the sense that it presents books that have repeatedly inspired some game designers in creating games, and in this sense it is a historical reconstruction. But looking at literature is a unique opportunity for searching new roads and new ways to get inspired for your game design: so let’s not consider the little world of literature “for games”, but simply intense, inspiring literature! [Read more…]

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