Awesome Soccer Trivia…
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!).
- …and the legacy is that we still refer to it internally as Brandon Soccer! To illustrate the point, our original “coming soon” website can still be seen over at http://www.brandonsoccer.co.uk !
- Coding began in earnest around Christmas 2005…
- …but has had various (up to 3 month) hiatuses here and there, meaning that it’s probably approaching nearer 2 years worth of actual development.
- Numerous different artists have been involved over the last 3 years, but for various reasons (normally the artist dropping off the face of the planet, their emails stopping etc) they never completed the required work. In many ways I’m really glad, as it led me onto our current artist Pavel, who has been nothing short of fantastic – a genuinely gifted artist and all round nice guy.
- The Ken Burns Effect (Pan & Zoom) used by the Menu System of Awesome Soccer is inspired by the Google Screensaver which kicks in when I’m obviously not working hard enough…
- And finally, who knew how complicated creating a realistic Fixture List would be? A seemingly straight forward computational task rendered very complex when incorporating “balance” whereby each team plays home one week and away the next. I was so surprised, but then I read on wikipedia that the very first Football League Fixture Calculation “process” was actually patented!
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