Well, the Awesome Soccer Alpha Demo has been available for 4 days now to our official Alpha Testers. Once again, we’d like to thank all of those kindly souls for helping during this exceptionally important phase – it’s really appreciated!

This testing has already helped to identify (and ultimately resolve) a few technical problems within the game; problems that only manifest themselves when trying to play the game on the myriad of PC and laptop configurations out there – and hence why Alpha Testing is so vital.

These problems included:

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Well, it’s taken slightly longer than originally planned, but the Alpha Demo is complete, and available for download by our Official Alpha Demo Testers.

A email or Forum PM should be winging it’s way over to all those that generously volunteered to help out during this important phase.

If you have not yet received your information, or you would also like to help Red27 Studios in the Alpha test phase, please join our Newsletter now (simple enter your email address within the Newsletter text field on the Red27 Studios Homepage and click the “subscribe” button).

You can read all about the feedback for the Alpha Demo version over at the forums, under the sticky thread here.

We sincerely hope everyone enjoys the demo, and we’d once again like to offer a massive “Thank-You” to all our Official Testers.

So after reading Part I, you’ve now got all the tools you need to start writing your very own soccer game. But what’s next? Well, here Peter continues the run down of how Awesome Soccer started out way, way back when… (cue those peculiar screen swirls and ‘that’ music)

1. Create some initial Sprites. For me, this involved photographing my son Brandon in his football kit facing in the 8 different (compass) directions, which was very funny for us both. This was followed by lots of image work in Paint Shop Pro and GIMP to cut around our hero to remove the background, and to resize to some appropriate sprite dimensions (although this resize did make him look completely out of proportion). We were finally left with 8 shiny new .png images:

2. Create an Application that loads in these images, and displays our player sprite on the screen. Exciting stuff…

3. Next, Implement control logic to move our player around the screen. This is pretty straight forward stuff; you read the keyboard for designated key presses and then increment the players x and y co-ordinates accordingly. Refine this to change the image displayed to the corresponding compass direction of the key presses.

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Well, it’s taken rather longer than expected to create the customised phpBB theme that fitted in with the general aesthetic of Red27 Studios (and we’re still not 100% satisfied with it), but nonetheless our Forums are now officially open for business!

We have a good complement of Forums for you to check out, ranging from the ever-so tongue in cheek “The Awesome Forum”, to the more practical “Technical Support”, and not forgetting our “General Chat Forum” where you can just blow off some steam about anything and everything else…

So what are you waiting for, join in the debate now, and voice your opinions about Awesome Soccer, Red27 Studios and the World!

We here at Red27 Studios thought we’d share an insight into the how a game like Awesome Soccer is actually developed. We’ll be spreading this blog posting over several parts as it obviously covers quite a lot of ground!

To start with, we’ll discuss the Development Tools that we use in house…

Development IDE – Eclipse. All our code is cut using this fabulous open source editor. Check it out at http://www.eclipse.org.

Icon Creation – IcoFx. What a great freeware Icon Editor this is. Simply the best one out there as far as we’re concerned. Intuitive interface, does everything you want an icon editor to do, and at a price no-one can baulk at! Discover what you’re missing over at http://icofx.ro.

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Peter, our Technical Director, talks us through some interesting & some not so interesting facts about Awesome Soccer…

• The idea for Awesome Soccer was born after I stumbled across a prototype of a Sensi Soccer clone that I had coded for the Amiga (in about 1994!). I’d been using the excellent Amiga Emulator WinUAE to take the trip down memory lane, which now has a LOT to answer for…

• Awesome Soccer actually started out life as “Brandon Soccer”, named after my son. The sprites used during the main development of the game were actually digitised photos of him, and he took great delight in watching himself whizz around the screen (it also allowed him to show off to his friends!).

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One of the key decisions that any online company like Red27 Studios has to make is which e-commerce payment processor to go with.  The benefits of using a third party for such a complex area as online sales are obvious, with the trade off being the associated cost to your company per transaction (10% being the norm).

Setting up a new payment provider is also a royal pain in the rear.  Not only do you have to (more…)