Minifootball player making a 6v6 game — looking for feedback from PES players

[Corangar94]

Suggest me

I'm curious what you'd want from a more skill-based 6v6 football game.

I used to play competitive minifootball in Romania, and I'm now building the football game I've wanted to play myself.

It's 6v6 and the idea is that football decisions should matter as much as button execution.

Passing is intended to reward direction, power and body position rather than automatically finding a teammate. Dribbling is more about timing a touch into space than chaining skill-move animations. Tackling commits the defender, so choosing when to step in matters.

Team tactics are also a big focus. I want you to be able to decide how your team builds attacks, creates space, presses and defends — and actually see your teammates trying to execute those instructions.

There will be spectacle, but I'm trying to make it something you earn. For example, a spectacular power strike should require the right player, body position, timing and clean contact rather than simply pressing a special-move button.

I'm currently thinking about control assistance and I'd especially like opinions on shooting.

If passing were fully manual, what would you prefer?

• completely manual shooting
• mostly manual aim with a small amount of goal tolerance
• semi-assisted shooting
• assisted shooting
• I'd need to actually play each system before deciding

Would you prefer to have walls around the field so the ball it's always in play?

Would you like to have faults or would like to punish bad tackles with losing speed and momentum?

I'm also curious about progression. For online competition, would you rather build and develop your own fictional squad under competitive limits, or have player abilities completely normalized for ranked play?

The game will have fictional players and a substantial single-player career. I'm strongly against purchasable competitive advantages/player-pack gambling.

Even though this is the main feedback that I am looking for anything else that would be important to you that would make the game fun to you I'd appreciate to know.

I'm not showing a demo yet because I'd rather show it when it's ready enough to judge properly. Right now I'm interested in how football-game players feel about these ideas and what I'm overlooking.

 

[sleevel]

Love this and I’ll make a few opening statements before I dive in:

- Make the game you want. Doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. Seriously. If you make a good game, people will play it. It’s not a good game because you made it the way people wanted it to be made, it’s a good game because it’s a good game.
- The average player likely has not played at the competitive level and does not have the same level of vision and intuition as you.

Now, onto the comments: what all soccer video games fail to capture is that body positioning and first touch are so critical. I would love if you could create a game where you can control this. How am I placing my body to setup my next touch and exactly why do I want the ball to land on that touch? Do that well and you’ve escaped pressure. Do it well (or ignore the importance) and you’ve lost the ball or all of your advantage as you’re now under severe pressure from a defender.

I love a great deal of control on passes and shooting. This isn’t simply a full manual, semi or automatic pass/shooting debate. I’m talking beyond full manual, actually controlling loft, spin and speed for each pass and shot. Almost never is a pass hit directly to a recipients feet directly. The passer knows what the recipient wants to do and knows where the pressure is, so they will adjust the shot to land in the safe area where they know the next touch likely will be taken.

I would suggest no walls and no fouls.

I think you’ll find that the reason FIFA and PES oversimplified so many things is because at an individual level, there is so much complexity and subtlety to body positioning and movement that it’s really (really) hard to get right in a video game in terms of controls and camera (you’d effectively need a first person camera). While it would be so awesome, think of how difficult it would be to program: set defender into blade stance (which foot is forward?), track player with ball (tight or loose), which way do I bias player (force ball holder to sideline or do I block passing/shooting lane). That’s just “jockeying” let alone trying to make a poke tackle with front foot, strong tackle with back foot, or desperation stick out a leg to block a dribble/pass/shot.

(I was working on a game for a while - I would be happy to share some thoughts and observations or help you in any way, provided we share a similar vision.)

 

[Corangar94]

Love this and I’ll make a few opening statements before I dive in:

- Make the game you want. Doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. Seriously. If you make a good game, people will play it. It’s not a good game because you made it the way people wanted it to be made, it’s a good game because it’s a good game.
- The average player likely has not played at the competitive level and does not have the same level of vision and intuition as you.

Now, onto the comments: what all soccer video games fail to capture is that body positioning and first touch are so critical. I would love if you could create a game where you can control this. How am I placing my body to setup my next touch and exactly why do I want the ball to land on that touch? Do that well and you’ve escaped pressure. Do it well (or ignore the importance) and you’ve lost the ball or all of your advantage as you’re now under severe pressure from a defender.

I love a great deal of control on passes and shooting. This isn’t simply a full manual, semi or automatic pass/shooting debate. I’m talking beyond full manual, actually controlling loft, spin and speed for each pass and shot. Almost never is a pass hit directly to a recipients feet directly. The passer knows what the recipient wants to do and knows where the pressure is, so they will adjust the shot to land in the safe area where they know the next touch likely will be taken.

I would suggest no walls and no fouls.

I think you’ll find that the reason FIFA and PES oversimplified so many things is because at an individual level, there is so much complexity and subtlety to body positioning and movement that it’s really (really) hard to get right in a video game in terms of controls and camera (you’d effectively need a first person camera). While it would be so awesome, think of how difficult it would be to program: set defender into blade stance (which foot is forward?), track player with ball (tight or loose), which way do I bias player (force ball holder to sideline or do I block passing/shooting lane). That’s just “jockeying” let alone trying to make a poke tackle with front foot, strong tackle with back foot, or desperation stick out a leg to block a dribble/pass/shot.

(I was working on a game for a while - I would be happy to share some thoughts and observations or help you in any way, provided we share a similar vision.)

Hey Sleevel,

First of all, thank you for the great feedback. I really appreciate your positivity, enthusiasm, and technical knowledge.

I completely agree that fully simulating body positioning and exactly how you strike the ball is incredibly complicated. It would require a level of animation and control complexity that I probably won’t be able to provide, and beyond that, I think a lot of it is something you feel rather than something you consciously see. Maybe that’s a job for future games and future hardware 😁

This actually reflects my general philosophy for the game quite well: I’m trying to subtract whatever doesn’t help the experience.

I’m not trying to make the game as realistic as technically possible. Instead, I want to break down the important actions in football and ask: what is fun, what rewards skill, what feels true to the sport, and what can be simplified without losing something important?

For body positioning, I’m probably going to follow the PES philosophy as closely as I can. You won’t be heavily punished because your body isn’t in the perfect position, but at the same time you shouldn’t be able to receive the ball facing away from goal and instantly shoot 180 degrees with no consequence.

Passing is where things get especially interesting for me, because it goes hand in hand with team shape and movement — something that I feel can almost win minifootball games by itself.

In real football, before you even make the pass, you already need some understanding of how your teammates behave: where they will move, what space they are trying to create, what space they are covering, and what they are likely to do after receiving the ball.

With that in mind, I completely agree with you that the player should be able to decide not only where the pass goes, but also what kind of pass it is, how much speed it has, and ideally even what kind of spin it carries.

That last part is something I’m still not fully sure how to solve mechanically. How do you give the player meaningful control over the spin of a pass without making the controls unnecessarily complicated? That’s still an open question for me, and something I need to think about.

On the first touch, I completely agree as well. A good first touch can be just as important as the pass itself. It can immediately escape pressure, create the next passing angle, or destroy the entire advantage if it’s poor.

Regarding fouls, I’m leaning toward agreeing with you. The game seems to flow better without constant interruptions.

For walls, I’m in a similar place. At least in my current testing, I prefer the game not stopping every time the ball reaches the side. What I’m less sure about is allowing players to deliberately use the wall for passes.

Right now, I personally don’t find myself using the wall much because it doesn’t feel advantageous compared with a normal pass. But who knows what kind of meta other players might discover once they get their hands on it.

That’s exactly the kind of thing I think will need proper testing with different types of players. I know I have my own bias because I naturally prefer passing and combination play, so I might completely miss the perspective of somebody who likes to dribble and take players on much more often.

Thanks again for the feedback. I’d genuinely appreciate your help, especially since it sounds like we might share quite a similar vision.

If everything goes well and I’m happy enough with the result, I’m hoping to have a small playable demo in a few weeks.

 

[sleevel]

This reminds me so much of what I grappled with.

I completely agree that a very skilled player doesn’t have to think about their foot shape, contact speed, timing. That’s all ingrained from thousands of repetitions. They are deciding outcomes - I want the ball here, at this time, with this velocity, height and spin.

They don’t really have to think about their body positioning either - they know to turn away from pressure and to setup their body to receive the ball on their ideal foot to setup their next ideal touch.

So really, what are you asking the video game player to control? What I had settled on was:

- Player movement with LS
- Dribble touches with RS (yes, each touch requires a flick - huge benefit is you can time exactly where and how you make your next touch to get past a defender)
- A consolidated (full manual) kick mechanism - there’s no separate pass or shoot, since they are both kicks. The difference is simply how hard you kick it. I experimented with many different methods but I ended up with 4 kick styles, each that corresponded to the 4 face buttons: low kick, medium loft with no spin, high loft with backspin, and side spin. (To the question of how do you control which way it spins? This is determined by the player’s position relative to the ball. If they are left of the ball, the ball spins left. This is true of both a right foot kick and a left “trivela” both spin left when the player is left of the ball.) The aim of the pass was with the left stick and I used the familiar charge up to determine speed, velocity, height and curl (varying by shot type).
- Off ball controls with D-pad. Call for support, call for an off ball run. Call when your fellow teammate is under pressure. Call for extra help on defense. (Mine was first person controlling a single player, so if yours switches player’s some of these may not be relevant.)
- Defense is what I never figured out. Generally, my theme is to reward good decision making without having to micromanage. So how tight to press, when to back off, when to poke or tackle, when to clog (or jump) a passing lane.

The philosophical issue I ran into was, if you automate so much because you assume you embody a top level player, then isn’t FIFA/PES’s current automated passing/shooting system actually what you’re trying to recreate?

 

[*aLe]

The philosophical issue I ran into was, if you automate so much because you assume you embody a top level player, then isn’t FIFA/PES’s current automated passing/shooting system actually what you’re trying to recreate?

I get what you mean, and I had an argument in the past already with a fellow member saying " if you want full manual you are basically ditching stats".
Would something like this work in your opinion? https://evoweb.uk/threads/pes2010-discussion-thread.52601/page-115#post-1698580

 

[sleevel]

I get what you mean, and I had an argument in the past already with a fellow member saying " if you want full manual you are basically ditching stats".
Would something like this work in your opinion? https://evoweb.uk/threads/pes2010-discussion-thread.52601/page-115#post-1698580

You could add error, even if you hit the perfect pass angle with your stick, if a player was under pressure or had low passing stats.

Though it brings up an interesting point - say you’re playing as Pirlo, should tapping the lofted ball button initiate the most lovely lofted ball into the path of the running player? Are you embodying both the pro player’s ability AND vision?

 

[*aLe]

That's a topic worth discussing.

I think that stats shouldn't "sabotage" the player input, as long as it's perfect. For a perfect input, the user should be rewarded with the perfect outcome I guess.
The idea is to actually make the stats influence error and difficulty: if you managed to give the input for a perfect pass, it should be perfect in my opinion (no matter if you were controlling Pirlo or the worst League Two player in the DB).

Stats in my opinion should come in in two scenarios:

• The user input doesn't match a "perfect" pass: the pass played by Pirlo should be more accurate than the one played by the League Two player (according to "accuracy" and "vision" stats maybe?)
• The player you're controlling is not in a favourable condition (under pressure, off-balance, or playing the pass with the wrong foot): the game should make playing a good pass more difficult for the user (maybe using "composure" or "balance" stats?) by maybe making the power bar fill in a way that makes it more difficult for the user to give the correct input. So, issuing a perfect input should be more difficult than in a normal situation, but it should still be easier with Pirtlo than with the League Two player.
  Then, if the user made a non-perfect pass (due to it being more difficult to execute), stats would make the pass made by the League Two player more inaccurate than Pirlo's one.

A thing that I actually can't put my finger on is this: saying that stats must not interfere with the playewr input if it's perfect requires us to define what is perfect, first of all.
If a "normal" pass might be considered perfect if it reaches a static player on his/her feet, when should a through ball be considered "perfect"? If it meets the receiver on his/her run without them having to modify their run to match the pass (for example stretching their leg out to reach the ball, curving the run, or slowing it down)?
When should a shot be considered perfect? When it goes in near the post/the crossbar?