A first look at the prototype of the Badge Designer Dialog that will feature within the Team Editor of Awesome Soccer:

Basically, it’s a quick and easy way to create your own customised badge for teams (this is only as an alternative to using a ready made badge image – which would normally be the case). It’s simple but effective; you can even generate a random badge if you’re seeking some inspiration…

Some samples of what it can produce so far:

The beautification of the Dialog will take place later, but it’s shaping up nicely…

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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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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