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Footy Bash

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Footy Bash

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Step into the world of Footy Bash, Experience the rush of fast-paced football with 1-4 players. Unleash spectacular speckys to leave your opponents in awe and land devastating hits to thrill your fans. With dynamic gameplay and a classic look, Footy Bash is an electrifying footy spectacle.

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Footy Bash - Open Beta Has Started 🏉

Oct 6, 2024

We've finally made it!

In the leadup to Steam NextFest, we have released our very first Open Beta for Footy bash.

This Open Beta will run from now until November 4th 16:59 AEDT (November 3rd 23:59 PDT), and we'd love to have you all jump on and have a kick and a punch!

Feedback is very important to us here at Danger Thumbs, and something we take very seriously. Throughout the development until now, we have had a very narrow set of testers who have had invaluable feedback, as well as public comments on our videos. With the amazing support thus far, we thought now would be the best time to get as many people as we can invested in the testing.

So this isn't a demo?

Not quite yet! The reason we're running this as a timed event is so that we can gather the feedback, break it all down and feed a million little chunks into our Trello board.

Once we've sorted out any larger issues we'll roll this out as a permanent Demo while we work on going to Early Access.

This helps us make sure that the Demo we put out is a one-for-one replication of our game mechanics, as well as something that we're happy to put our names to.

So what can we expect in this Open Beta and the upcoming Demo?

We will be limiting some functionality in the Open Beta and Demo of course, but we want people to be able to play entire games, hopefully multiple of, and make an informed decision as to whether or not they'd like to take the plunge into the main content!

We will have the Quick Play game mode available which is 1 to 4 players, as well as basic configurations such as AI difficulty.

Features such as team customisations, perk selection, etc... will, at the time of writing this, be limited to the non-Demo version.

I have some ideas that could be cool!

Excellent! We really encourage everyone to hop over to our Discord [discord.gg] and share it with the Devs and the community!

Footy Bash

Demo difficulty

I feel like the AI difficulty for the demo has been rammed up to the highest possible level, as I get swarmed anytime I touch the ball, giving me no time to even decide what I'm going to try to do, and the kick is really hard to effectively pull off (trying to kick it back in after a point, I either kick it straight back to them by tapping the button or get tackled straight away trying to hold the kick button down and have a goal scored on me). I've lost the three games I've played by 10-15 goals, and the ...

EnemyStarship

May 21 @ 6:10pm

General Discussions

Dev Update # 2 - AI Overview

Aug 21, 2024

G'day!

This Dev Update will primarily focus on the games AI at a high level, and going through some of our thoughts behind their thoughts.

When the game was unveiled at PAX 23, the AI was rudimentary at best. If the ball was within X distance of an AI, they would run at it. Once they ran X distance away from their designated area, they would run back.

This caused instances where it would be a clump of AI players chasing after the player with the ball, with little much else happening. Since the AI is such a big part of the game, especially for the single player experience, we decided it was time to take a deeper dive into it.

AI Behaviour

Decision making

A lot of the changes will relate to the ability for the AI to make more informed and relevant decisions. Some of those decision groupings are:

Is my team on the attack?

Albeit an obvious thing to have included, the AI will now take into consideration the position of the players in relation to the ball and determine

Is the ball in my forward line?
Do I look for space in the 50?
Do I need to clear the ball?
Should I handball?

Is my team on the defensive?

As above, having the understanding to know they are on the defensive, and determine

Where is my player to man-up?
Move to intercept
Get between player and the ball

General awareness

There are some actions that are not specific to either offence or defence, and having this in the decision making process will make the plays more fluid, and remove any harsh transitions of offence to defence. Also, it will help mitigate players learning any AI plays as they should be relatively random.

The more general decision making would fit under

Where is the ball?
Should I sprint forward? Support the carrier? Lead for a handball?
If the ball is in the air, can I mark?
Can I contest the mark? Should I contest the position, or move to try smother a kick?
Should I use my offensive or defensive perk?
Should I roam to try open up a play?

The above list is a good brief summary of the types of decisions we are looking to keep implementing, and setting it up in a way where decision making itself can be adjusted via difficulty. Even though the decision is there, sometimes the AI might not be able to react in time!

What variables do the difficulties adjust?

A more static approach to adding difficulties was to build their decision making on top of a base of hard coded variables, which lets players get what they're expecting at the easier difficulties. Examples of the variables that would be fixed would include

Punch cooldown
Special ability cooldown
Smother distance and area covered by smother
Kick accuracy variation

That's awesome, but what does that mean moving forward?

Well, great question! In breaking up each scenario into smaller individual decisions we will be able to work toward creating a more fluid AI, and even have external factors like weather, player stats, etc... interact with those decisions.

At the moment, the couch coop/PvP aspect of this game is where it shines as it's where we spent the most time. But we are currently working to make sure that single player will be just as fun (if not better!).

Footy Bash

Dev Update #1

Jun 5, 2024

G'day!

As our first post for our Dev Blog, we thought we'd talk about our players not having a backbone.

With the first iteration of character models and animations, we have now figured out what we need our players to do and how. But to do this, they need to grow a backbone!

Let us introduce, Reginald.

Reginald isn't a playable character in the game, but he is going to be the bones (literally) of each player.

The original animations were a POC that worked well enough that we were able to bolt on things as we needed as the game took shape, now we know our requirements.

Rerigging it to a skeleton means the animation will look great no matter the body composition we attach to it, it also means we can add targets like you can see in the above GIF for dynamic animation mixing.

For example, the player can run whilst reaching for the ball with one hand, and face palming another player with the other. Other fun use cases can be dynamic marking, jostling for position under a kick, etc...

Another exciting thing is that we can retain the aesthetic of our game, but bring in a lot more dynamic movement of the character allowing us, for example, to differentiate between normal movement and sprinting.

We're excited to show you all of the shirt pulling, face mashing, elbow behind the refs back animations we have coming, so stay tuned!

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