Professional Footballer

‘Most important thing as a Professional Footballer is to know how to dive!’

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In Professional Footballer upon losing possession of the ball, you must perform a Dive. The more spectacular the Dive, the more points and better score you’ll achieve – maybe even being recognised as the real Neymar.

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Professional Footballer was created as part of the Pizza Jam 3 (where the 1st & 2nd place games win a pizza). The theme of the Jam was ZX Spectrum Games - where you picked a game that was published on the console, and then base the game on the games name (not what the game was about). We ended up choosing Professional Footballer, which was released in 1991 on the Spectrum. 

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I was working with my Girlfriend for this Jam, she would create the art and I would undertake the programming (meaning the game would look a lot better than my normal games). We settled on making the game in 2D, to best take advantage of her skills. 

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We came up with the idea of a game where you had to perform the best dive possible upon losing the ball, then rewarding the player for how far they travelled. The next step was planning out what assets would be needed - a player, stadium and ball, and could start prototyping the core mechanics for the game. We decided on the playre being a ragdoll, as they always provide funny aspect + unexpected behaviour. This proved initally challenging as Unity didn't have an easy way to implement a 2D Ragdoll; however I managed to construct one out of Hinge and Fixed Joints. It created the Ragdoll effect we wanted and I could freeze/unfreeze any joints whenever needed. The next step was implementing the ability to apply forces to each limb, and then have it applied once the character is unfrozen. The main issue this part provided was how the user selected each limb, apply an amount of force and de/re-select a