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…

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.

4. Create a Football pitch! Shouldn’t be too hard now should it?
However, being the perfectionist (code monkey) that I am, I decided that I wanted to algorithmically produce a football pitch, so it could be produced at any size and any width (I had some lofty ideas about allowing extra wide pitches like Wembley, or thin ones like the old Highbury. I even wanted to allow for a 5-a-side type pitch). This took far longer to do it than I’d previously estimated, but the pitches were ultimately produced to precise and exact FIFA regulations! They could be any width & height in yards, and even allowed you to specify the number of pixels per yard! The shame of that geekery lives with me to this day…. (I had also wanted to allow various different types of lawn “mowing” patterns at this stage, but I’d wasted too much time already, so that would only in the game much, much later…)

5. So now we can finally display our player on an actual pitch. That followed swiftly with the first “sit back and smile whilst gushing with self satisfaction” moment, and a feeling that I was actually making some progress…

6. Implement Ball Physics. This was probably one of the key battles – realistic ball motion and bounce. Time to cast your mind back to A-Level Maths and Physics, or more realistically, start googling for the equations of motion, conservation of linear momentum, projectile physics…blah blah blah. I will not bore you good readers with details of that, but there is a lot of info out there on the web about projectiles (hint, hint).

7. So now (again after a not insignificant period of coding), we can move the ball around the screen with the cursor keys (I added a toggle key to change between controlling the player and controlling the ball for this). Pressing the spacebar would “kick” the ball at a preset power. Nice!

8. Next, it was obvious that you needed to somehow to represent that the ball had height and was flying through the air within this high angled 2D persective, so the only real solution was to incorporate a ball shadow. At first I thought this would simply be a question of drawing the shadow at the co-ordinate (ballX + ballHeight, ballY – ballHeight), but that doesn’t quite produce a realistic effect. Again, a subtle little bit of maths (think Trigonometric Triangles) produces the desired effect. Job Done!

9. Next – Scrolling the pitch around to follow the ball. Always a key battle in any game, how to control the scrolling of a large playing area (in our case the pitch) when you have a limited display area (ie the screen). After various trials and various errors, I came up with a solution to scroll the pitch correctly so that the camera kept up with play nicely……which was the cue for the second ‘sit back and smile’ moment….

So that’s it for Part II….in Part III we’ll discuss how one player became a team…

My my, that could be the title of a motivational lecture couldn’t it?

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.

Installer Creation software – NSIS (Windows). Yet another example of Open Source software at its very best. Extremely powerful, if somewhat confusing to the novice, this software offers so much configuration. Whilst there are other packages out there, this one does everything Red27 Studios needs (and much much more). More information can be found at http://nsis.sourceforge.net.

Graphics software – GIMP! Yes, ridiculous name aside (it’s an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program), this is yet more quality Open Source software. It is by no means perfect; the interface is particularly unfriendly, especially to Windows users accustomed to graphics packages like PhotoShop and PaintShopPro. However, if you can overlook this niggle, you will be treated to a wealth of powerful artistic functions. Find it here at http://www.gimp.org.

Sound Software – Audacity. Again, unsurprisingly (you’ve spotted the theme haven’t you?) this is Open Source software at it’s very, very best. Cut your Sound FX to your hearts content, add echoes, reverbs, fade in/out – everything. It will export at .wav, .mp3 etc, and is intuitive and easy to use. http://audacity.sourceforge.net.

In Game Video Software – Fraps. Not much more to say really; we use this software to produce the .avi files that can be edited and uploaded to youTube. Find it at http://www.fraps.com.

So that just about wraps it up for Part I, but stay tuned for Part II coming soon…

Finally, any questions, comments or suggestions you have about what you’d like to see covered in this series of articles would be most welcome.