Hey!

I’m Dmitry, co-founder and developer at Team Serpico – a game development studio of 15 people based in Minsk, Belarus.

Back in early summer 2018 development of my previous game – Basement – was entering the final stage. It was a strategy game where you act as a local drug dealer and try to grow your so-called “empire”. At that moment I and people I was working with realized that we are too tired of 5-year long collaboration so the time has come to part our ways and start a new chapter.

One day I paid a visit to my friends from Weappy to talk through recent news in the game industry and discuss with them a few ideas I had. Guys already were kinda successful with the series called This is the Police. It turned out that we all had the very same idea of an arcade sports, specifically football, game that emphasizes brawl, combos, super strikes over simulating genuine football. It resembled some of the great NES games such as Goal 3 (Kunio-kun no Nekketsu Soccer League), Blades of Steel (Ice Hockey by Konami).

So we’ve settled on this idea. The genre has been chosen and we had some kind of understanding what the gameplay will look like. Final piece we were missing are characters and their story. Usually there’s two common ways – either you go with creating your own fictional characters and lore or purchase rights for a well-known IP (like Marvel’s Iron Man or DC’s Batman). First one requires a lot of effort and advanced story-telling skills for making the whole universe with compelling characters. Second one wasn’t really an option for an independent game studio because of the huge fee.

The answer to this dilemma lies within the greatest source of human knowledge – written literature. British literature in particular. And there are some grounds for that.

First, football and England are, for obvious reasons, almost synonymous. Secondly and most importantly, the literary tradition of this culture is one of the longest, richest, and most diverse, and has served for many generations as a principal supplier of popular images, heroes, and archetypes.

The position of British culture against the background of all the others was most clearly illustrated by the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics – a formal sporting event that in fact has nothing to do with sports. Where other countries attempt to convey their identity through complex metaphysical abstractions, the British can allow themselves to consistently bring to the arena their own heroes, both real and fictional: Kenneth Branagh depicts an entrepreneur from all the novels of the late 19th Century at once; Mr. Bean prevents the orchestra from playing the "Chariots of Fire" soundtrack; Joan Rowling reads a bedtime story to the audience; the Queen and James Bond jump out of a helicopter. The result was inevitable: it was the most fascinating Olympics show in modern history, with record ratings, and the North American audience has never so closely watched an opening ceremony taking place outside the United States. The influence of British culture is still so great that even the recent royal wedding – a solemn and many-hour spectacle – became a televised smash hit, because of the understandable desire of people around the world to feel involved in an old English fairy tale.

Along with this, let's not forget that there are a lot of historical heroes on par with fictional ones. Is Lawrence of Arabia any good at football? Of course he is! As well as legendary consulting detective Sherlock Holmes, noble King Arthur and Knights of the Round Table, the most iconic vampire of all times - Dracula. And that’s only a few of them.

That completed the whole game theme puzzle. Next steps were to assemble these characters in teams, make them interact with each other and so on. And that’s a topic for the next blog by our game designer Anton.

If you have any questions about the game or simply want to talk to the dev team – join our Discord. Cheers!