Awesome Soccer has been previewed within the excellent Indie Game Magazine.

You can read the entire article at The Indie Game Magazine’s Awesome Soccer Preview.

“Awesome Soccer by Red27 Studios is a no frills soccer (football) game that focuses on simple and deep gameplay. Awesome Soccer immediately reminds one of the classic Sensible World of Soccer. Awesome soccer has a simplified control system where you move with the keyboard and only have one button to execute all your passing, shooting, slide tackling, etc. There is also an aftertouch system that allows you to put “swerve” on your shots (another similarity to Sensible World of Soccer). Luckily for Awesome Soccer, it’s visuals are not a decade old. (more…)

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…

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!).

(more…)

Development has been progressing well on the production of the Alpha Demo, and we are aiming to have it ready within the next couple of weeks.

Check out a current screenshot showing the intro for a match between Argentina and Brazil:

Click to enlarge

In the meantime, if you are interested in becoming an “official” alpha tester for the game, please contact us, and be sure to sign up for the Red27 Studios Newsletter.