Today we released the latest demo for Super Sub: World Cup!

It's one of the final steps before releasing the full game, which is planned for release during the (2026) Football World Cup.

It most likely won't be the final demo. Though this demo is reasonably polished and full of content, playtests keep showing us ways to improve the game, and we're already busy with an overhaul of several parts.

• It's available for free on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

• You can play it with mouse, keyboard, or touchscreen. (Controller is also supported, but there is no UI explaining which keys to press yet.)

• It contains the first 3 matches and first upgrades in every branch.

• It contains 4 unique modes. You can play a chill version, or a more difficult one with smart opponents, or try the smaller and faster Futsal mode, and more.

• And it contains 14 countries to play.

We wanted to give you a broad taste of all the final game will have to offer, instead of a very curated tiny portion of it. Maybe this approach was a mistake---we're learning about Steam and demos as we go---so let us know what you think.

The game is already "content complete". It means all the upgrades, matches, modes, teams, ideas, everything has been made and put into the game already.

In this final stretch we must finish the second important step to making a fun game: balancing all the ideas and finding the best version of them. Until the release of the game, I'll probably be endlessly tweaking numbers, switching the order of upgrades, and testing if it's too hard or too easy now ;)

Some more surface-level features are also missing in the demo due to time constraints. For example,

• Full support for controller input is only a few steps away.

• Some actions have no (clear) feedback yet, or reasonable limits to their power, and are therefore not very usable in play.

• And of course, as always, more visual polish and tiny bug fixes.

As it stands now, the full game will have a bracket of 8 matches (increasing in difficulty; group stage until final), 50+ countries, 10 modes to play, and a massive upgrade tree with nearly 150 upgrades.

It certainly won't be required to buy them all (to beat the game). We designed the upgrades to allow you to choose how you want to play. You could go all-in on one thing as your playstyle and ignore all the other upgrades if you so desire.

As stated, all of this is already in the game! We just need to balance it, find the strongest parts, and cut what doesn't work. For example, penalty kicks have been implemented for weeks, but I've only just started testing them. (They're not part of this demo; they're one of the final upgrades.)

"Why did you do that?! Why wouldn't you just make one thing, balance/test it, then add the next!? Are you insane?"

This is partially just the nature of creative work. I think any game developer will tell you that you start by "diverging" (brainstorming and playing around), collecting all your ideas, and then "converging" (narrowing it down to the best ones).

It's also simply how my brain works. It refuses to think linearly or in steps with a fixed order. So I hop around from task to task until everything I could think of is supported by the game. Then, from this beautiful mess, I try to distill a streamlined balanced game. Developing games this way is what works best for me, as proven by all the free games I released before this point!

Any feedback is welcome. Leave a review, send me an email, anything. The game has so much content that it's hard for us to test all the different combinations, play styles, strategies, and see if anything is broken (too easy, too hard, just not fun, whatever).

And of course, wishlist the game to show your interest and motivate me :)

Try the demo, have fun, talk to you soon,

Pandaqi