FootBulls by goffmog
It's X-com, but with football, and with cows.
And for the first time ever, there's music!


Post-mortem and design notes
Would have liked to get animation in, or at least proper trajectories for the ball. And way more feedback. Two game mechanics that didn't make the cut in the end were passing into space, and the use of the dribbling skill.
Dribbling was supposed to be used to move past opponents, which was meant to be risky if they were good at blocking. But it made the game too difficult and less fun to go attacking.
Also I couldn't get anywhere near making an actual AI for the singleplayer mode, which was a pity. But I did music instead so you can't have everything.
Techie notes
I used Unity for the engine and wrote all the gameplay code from scratch in C#.
The music was created in something called Soundbox (http://sb.bitsnbites.eu/) which I found to have just the right level of streamlining vs flexibility for my needs and experience level with trackers.
For the graphics, everything is just Unity's built in standard shaders, rendering prefabs made up of default Unity primitives.
The font is the first font I found in a Google search for "bubbly font"
I can't believe I missed the opportunity to label the move button "Moove"
As some have noted, and as I've been noticing on other people's games - a recent Chrome update has broken sound in Unity HTML5 builds. I'm keeping the web build up for convenience but please consider playing the Windows version for the full experience. I have also put the music up on Soundcloud https://soundcloud.com/thebuffles
| Windows | https://s3.amazonaws.com/goffmogld41/goffmogld41.zip |
| HTML5 (web) | http://www.goffmog.com/ld41/ |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/footbulls |
Ratings
| Overall | 659th | 3.386⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 590th | 3.294⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 653th | 3.271⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 370th | 3.871⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 844th | 3.043⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 659th | 2.722⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 489th | 3.054⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 847th | 2.964⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 44🗳️ | 31🗨️ |
Good job on this one, have a fish <3 🐟
I feel I should say something about the music though. It's an original recording but the melody isn't original. I ripped it off* of an obscure demo version of an obscure track called The Machine by an obscure EDM group called Vision Talk. I came across it one day in the dark recesses of Spotify and thought it sounded a lot like it belonged in the soundtrack of a mid-90s football game and bookmarked it for future reference.
* It's also ripped off badly because I have no ear.
If you are planning a post-jam version, the AI mode you told in the description will work really fine.
Here is our game if you want to try it!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/me-da-miedito-la-oscuridad-i-get-goosebumps-in-the-dark
Ideas for improvement:
- Give each player one 'not standard' move, like 'Get pumped - next turn + 2 movement', 'Aggro - Get +3 tackle for each adjecent opponent for 2 turns'
- Tackle/shoot/cheer sound effects
- Some weirdness - lootboxes, powerups, fans on the field, lightning strikes :P
Suggestions/nitpicks:
* a grid on the field would be nice
* shouldn't the range of the ball be limited in addition to chance of shooting in the given direction?
* different players could be different animals (given starting set of stats) and then making the team would play a big role (plus with more animals there's the opportunity to horn in more baa(d) puns)