Originally published on indieDB (20th Feb 2017).

A computer virus trained in playing digital football is on a mission to deliver white ball of data in order to defeat handsome AI. Pass the ball, plan your future movements and outsmart your opponent :D Interested in learning how a small game like this evolves?

First there is an inspiration

I’m a gamer. I play games. FIFA games especially. But I never really wondered what is so fun about it. Until, out of boredom, I did. Turns out I just freaking love passing the ball and avoiding enemies in football games. This one mechanic is so addicting that I could spend a whole night without eating, sleeping or caring about the world just to run around with some dudes with sweated T-shirts after a ball. This is it, I said. This will be my game :D.

That’s what I’m talking about :D

Then the god created prototypes

This was time to get my hands dirty. After a month of sitting in front of a computer, staring at some mystical code and forgoing any social interaction, something playable was born. Granted, it looked like shit, but at least I proved to myself that this can be a viable game. Now the real fun was supposed to begin :D

That’s how the game looked like after 30 days

We’ve got a prototype. Now how to make it look well?

This is a tough question. So tough in fact, that it took me more than a month of experimentation and inspiration from the internet to come up with something reminiscent of the current state of the game that you can admire from gifs :D.
I added dynamic lights, trails behind players, and some particles behind entities.

Then I decided to change the color scheme. This little improvement made the game look much better:

While the visuals are far from perfect, it’s a good place to start :)

The easy part is done, now the content…

Designing games is hard. Really hard. So far I managed to fill only a few pages from my “game design notebook” (gosh, what a name :D) with some concept drawings:

Great, what next? :D

• Definitely more content has to be created. New mechanics and ways to play are coming. In fact you saw some of them on the screenshots from the notepad :). Variety is going to be a strong selling point about DigiBall :D.

• I’m also constantly working on visuals. Tinkering a little bit with OpenGL shaders. There is a lot to learn about it… :D

• Later a short demo of DigiBall will probably appear somewhere on the internet. That will take a while though :).

Feel free to leave any fresh ideas and follow me on twitter: @artecgam
‘Til the next time, Have fun! :D