Awesome Soccer is our flagship “product”, an absurd soccer simulation game. It was what got me (Pip) into coding.

What’s on our webpage right now is the 4th version of the game that we’ve made. It went through quite a few rewrites, each with exciting new additions and changes.

The first version was made in summer of 2015 in a single day, and was meant to mock some random soccer-themed Facebook game my cousin was playing at the time. I had 0 knowledge of coding or anything web-related at the time, so it was literally just a single button that printed 1s and 0s. I didn’t do anything else with it until 2017.

Somehow, the css of the site kept getting worse over the years. The button is meant to go below the image (which works as a button anyways, so why did I even leave it in?)

2017 was my last year of highschool and I was in the ICT class. I wasn’t very fond of it, but did all the assignments, always. In the third semester we had to follow some tutorials on Python and to make a commandline agenda app.

I was never the type of guy to follow tutorial videos, so I set out to make something else and fuel my learning with Google searches when I got stuck. The first idea to come to my mind was to make a ‘remastered’ version of my little 2015 web thing. wFridge was sitting next to me in class, so he was very involved, and together we came up and added a ton of fun features to the game: streaks, unlockable balls & shoes, Legendary Points, and even a turn-based combat minigame. We didn’t really plan anything, and just kept adding whatever silly things we’d come up with. Somehow, it all ‘clicked’ together very well. Or so I think.

All that text clumped together really gave it a cozy feel.

I consider that to be the first “real” version of Awesome Soccer; it established the core gameplay & features, the level of absurdity, and had a really special charm to it, at least for me. It impressed the teacher a lot. That summer I decided to rewrite the game in a better engine and expand upon it with the hope of releasing a “full” game.

I swapped the game from TKinter (the default interface module for Python) to Pygame (which still felt incredibly rudimentary) and rewrote the game throughout the summer. My plans were to have 4 full-fledged game modes which would interact with each other. Those would include an adventure mode (with expanded combat and random events/dialogues, kinda like Dead Road to Canada), an arcade with ball-themed minigames and for some reason, a ball-dating simulator.

Combat in progress. That version of the game even had a small skill tree.

The adventure mode’s development got quite far, until I realised that it was too ambitious and detached from the core idea of the game (the 50/50 soccer “matches”). I stopped working on it after winter to get into Unity (and worked on The Siege of Kaerwood, our second game).

For the next few months the game was in a limbo. I have always wanted to update the 2015 browser version, but didn’t have the skills to do so until summer of 2019. This new browser version was made in 1-2 weeks at the end of August, and also lead to the creation of our website.

Following that, I spent the next 2 months polishing it and adding new features (version 0.2) and that’s the version you can play now. It probably seems crazy that it took so long to make that, but that’s because I’m in my last school year before university and it’s hindering my time for projects a bit.

But we’re not done with it just yet. I would like to re-add the combat minigame and shoes, and that will be the focus of the next big update. Gotta be careful this time to not push the idea too far.

Thanks for reading. If you want to see the 2015 version, it’s here. Try to ignore the broken css. And I’d love to hear what you think of the current version!