Board Soccer

Board Soccer is a retro, spring-loaded tabletop football game for iOS and Android, one of my personal projects.

It is inspired by the classic spring-loaded tabletop football toys, and now includes a team editor and formation customization.

Gameplay

After choosing one of the approximately 50 countries you want to represent, it's time for action. The game unfolds much like the old tabletop games, where each of your players are stuck in place, with a radius around them which magnetises the ball to them when it's close. You move the ball by pulling your character back with a nice percentage meter telling you how powerful the kick will be, and by aiming where you want to go. It sounds fairly straightforward but there are challenges, like having to consider the effect the player's drags will have on the ball. That is a big part of the fun though, shooting from across the field and watching the ball perfectly curve where you want it to go. You can even pick up a super shot buff.
This slows down the opposing teams wildly oscillating keeper and eliminates the sway from aiming. Again, it provides a lot of fun when you get the buff, pass it to your defenders and score a screamer across the pitch.

Fouls and cards

You do need to keep track of time though, as if one of your plastic ballers’ holds onto the ball for too long you will be yellow carded. It's a very good feature to keep the game rolling, and you do get quite a large grace period before the infraction, around 13 or 14 seconds. If you get booked twice on the same player, they do get sent off like real football, which removes them and their field of influence from the board.

Tech background

The game runs on Unity with fully custom shaders. The grass is rendered with an 8-level ray marching approach, a good tradeoff between quality and performance for the targeted mobile devices.
The players use a matcap shader combined with baked ambient occlusion for a shiny plastic look.
Many environment elements use parallax occlusion mapping to suggest more geometric detail than is actually there.

*** Update 1.16 ***
-Added Group Match, a new game mode for local round robin group team tournaments
-Ivory Coast is renamed to Côte d'Ivoire
-Fixed several issues

*** Update 1.15 ***
-Added 5 more countries: India, Israel, Ivory Coast, Pakistan, Peru
-Fixed a handful of UI elements
-Minor in-game fixes
-Updated ad SDKs

*** Update 1.14 ***
Board Soccer with a massive update is now released!

-Formation editor in player selector to allow changing the position of the players on the board. This is always randomly initialized and players can edit the positions of each individual players by moving the pin on the board.
-Custom Team editor now allows players to add any team by specifying the colors, team name, code and even a flag image.
-If the central player gets a red flag, another player will substitute their position for kick offs.