Author: Wobbles

For this version I have begun giving the other players some AI, however it’s very basic for now.

For the AI player, if he detects that the ball is available he will run towards it. Once he collects it he will make a pass to you. I have also added the player velocity to the calculation so the space pass works even if you are moving. Of course, if you change direction after your team mate has passed the ball it will miss it’s target. This was the same in the original Football Superstars game as you cannot predict what another player’s change of direction might be, obviously. If you are in possession he doesn’t know what to do so he just runs in circles!

I also updated the goalkeeper so that he can detect the ball coming. He will now make a dive to one side or the other based on where in his detection zone the ball is. It’s not very accurate and needs modifying, but it suffices for now. The diving animations are taken from Mixamo.

This means I can now play a one-two with my team mate to score a goal, with the goalkeeper making a diving attempt to save it. He can’t actually save it yet but it looks good! I used the Unity Physics Raycast functionality on the goalmouth so that a target now appears for your player when you are aiming towards the goal. This gives you a better idea of where your shot is going when shooting.

You can see it all in action in the latest video below.

For this version I have added something that was in the original Football Superstars game – Space Passing. This allowed you to target a team mate and use the spacebar to pass the ball directly to his feet, even if he was running.

To get this to work you have to resort to some mathematics. You know the start position of the ball and you can also get the position of the target player.

My maths sucks, so I researched the required formula online and created a method in Unity (I’m using the C# scripting language) to make this calculation which is called whenever you hit the spacebar in the game.

For the moment, the receiving player is static. However, he will return the ball to you after about 1 second. This version doesn’t take your velocity into account so you need to be static when receiving the ball. However, the AI will locate you if you even if you have moved and return the ball to your feet.

The ball still uses the Unity physics engine, but the required velocity and angle to reach the target is pre-calculated. Once the receiving player detects the ball at his feet he will capture it and control it to stop it going any further.

For this version, I loaded the Mixamo football character into Blender and created some new football kit textures for him using Gimp. I also created a goalkeeper version and gave him a goalkeeping idle animation taken from Mixamo.

I now have two teams on the pitch. None of them have been programmed to do anything yet, but they’re there and have the same animation capabilities as the main player.

Some notes on the camera and controls. The third-person camera distance can be zoomed in and out using the mouse scroll wheel. You can rotate around you character by holding the right mouse button. The left button kicks the ball. Once kicked, the ball is under the control of the built in Unity physics engine. An amount of force is added to the ball’s rigidbody based on the vertical camera angle.

Football Superstars was a third-person football MMO which largely flew under the radar, which is a shame for such an excellent and unique football game. It ran continuously from around 2008 – 2020, undergoing a change of ownership around 2014. It is easily my most played game ever with Steam showing around 6000 hours of play and I also played many hours outside of Steam. It was originally developed by Monumental and published by CyberSports (now defunct). The IP is now owned by Coli Games who ran the game from 2014 and who are now reportedly developing a new version using Unity. Coli Games also developed a spin-off browser-based game called Striker Superstars which has also now been shut down.

Once Football Superstars died, my thoughts turned to how challenging it would be to develop a similar game using a modern game engine such as Unity or Unreal. I am much more familiar with Unity than Unreal so I opted for the former.

To make it a little different from the original Football Superstars I decided to base the game on the lesser-known football variation called Futsal, though the engine should be able to adapt to any style of football. It will also be offline only as creating an online game is whole different ball game (pun intended). I will also just be using free assets and tools to create the basics of the game, though I will certainly need to create some basic models and textures myself. These can always be updated later if the game works as intended.

The first stage was to establish the basic technology of a footballer controlling the ball. I created a Futsal Arena in Blender and imported it into Unity. The footballer is a free football character taken from the excellent Mixamo website. This is also the source of the idle, running and kicking animations. I modified the running animation slightly for dribbling using Blender’s animation tools.

Here is a video of my first efforts.