Part One
Summer 2020 saw the release of two small football management games by two-man indie game outfit Swipe Studios – Euro Five A Side Football 2000 and Five A Side Football 2021. I’m Ross, one half of that duo, and in this post I’ll be writing a bit about how my co-developer Pete and I tried to create a slightly different experience in a genre that stands entirely in the shadow of Football Manager…
I’ve been a big fan and very addicted player since Championship Manager 2 in 96/97, following the series over to Football Manager, and sinking pretty much every spare moment of my youth into tinkering with teams that I’d become fascinated with via TV’s Football Italia on Channel 4. By the time I’d moved out of home at 18 the addiction had become problematic; time that should have been spent studying or working was getting lost to all night binges of sifting through lists of all players released on a free transfer everywhere in the world, and ultimately ‘cold turkey’ and leaving it all behind was the only sensible way out.
Fast-forward 15 years, throw in a few itch-scratching stints on Football Manager Mobile and a cancelled Euro 2020 Championships, cross it with watching footage of old Masters Football tournaments from Sky TV on YouTube, and the idea for Euro Five A Side Football 2000 came about. Pete and I had released our first football-themed game three years beforehand – Swipe Manager: Soccer, a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ game in the style of mediaeval-themed mobile hit Reigns – but this was to be something completely different for us. As the UK was in national lockdown at this point we found we had plenty of spare evenings and weekends to work on the game, got excited about re-visiting the era of Del Piero, Kluivert, Shearer et al and giving them all tweaked names like the PS2-era Pro Evo games did, and spent far too much time reading about the stats and maths required to make an attempt at modelling how the beautiful game plays out.
We’d worked hard to capture what we felt were the key gameplay elements (with the obvious elephant in the room being that we’re two people with a couple of months on our hands, rather than an FM-sized team of highly skilled and specialised developers working on an annualised cycle) – resource balancing of player skill vs fitness vs match fee for only five players in the starting lineup, a simple 2D match engine with a pitch and some commentary, and a straightforward tournament structure. We made an early version of the game available to friends and family and took on board a lot of feedback and got the game ready for full release in-line with when Euro 2020 had been due to start – we really felt like this had the potential to fill a football void for players and were excited to get it out there for the world to see!
Disappointingly, but probably unsurprisingly, it did not redefine the sports management genre nor finance speedboats or a Ferrari for each of us. We were left wondering whether people simply weren’t interested in our more simple and straightforward take on controlling a team, whether a lack of marketing had limited our exposure to the marketplace, or something else. We asked everyone we knew who’d played it for honest feedback in the hope of figuring out where we’d gone wrong, and then the answer started to emerge – why would younger players (who make up a large portion of the passing traffic on the App Store and Google Play) care about something themed around a tournament that happened before they were born?
It came as a bit of a slap in the face to us – whilst Euro 2000 was no Euro 96 we still fondly remembered the players from that era, and had possibly become blinkered by that. We took it as a sign though that if we could offer our gameplay experience but in line with modern teams that we may be on to something, and sowed the seed in our minds that a version of the game in time for the upcoming Premier League season could be a better shot…
Euro Five A Side Football 2000 Links:
App Store: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/euro-five-a-side-football-2000/id1511597902
Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.SwipeStudios.EuroFiveASideFootball2000
Part Two
The start of the new Premier League season became our new deadline on the horizon, and one that we were excited to try and hit. We knew that we wanted to keep the same core gameplay loop as Euro Five A Side Football 2000 in terms of the matchday and juggling player fitness against match fee, but that time also needed to be invested in a week-by-week fixture/results system and league table structure – this turned out to be no small undertaking however and became something of a black hole timesink during development.
One pretty big task when making the game was creating the database for 300 players from scratch; each requiring a tweaked name, a face image, age, and defensive and attacking stats based on his real life persona. By FM standards, having something like 750,000 people represented, this probably sounds like very small fry but it was something we really felt was worth putting time into rather than just randomly generating data for every player in the game. We ended up with an annoyingly tricky job on our hands when it came to shuffling players around after the summer transfer window shut, but you’ll read more about our database structure woes later on…
A lesson we well and truly learned, but one that should have been pretty obvious now that we look back on it, is that you can’t put your toe over the line when it comes to Intellectual Property infringement; especially when Apple is involved. We’d originally wanted to call the game Premier Five A Side Football 2021 but due to App Store limits had instead gone for EPL Five A Side Football 2021 (admittedly it was a very long shot thinking this would be accepted…), and along with using city names for teams (Liverpool, Wolverhampton etc) and badges that were decent knock-offs seemed to catch Apple’s attention and resulted in the game being rejected for release. Cue a couple of days scrambled effort to rework all of these (team names switched to nicknames; Reds, Gunners, etc), as well as a name change, to ensure that we’d finally be able to put the game on sale to the public.
Since release we’ve been able to reflect on what went right and what went wrong – on the one hand our sense of achievement at developing a game we were happy with in the planned timeframe, and on the other hand everything that remained on the ‘To Do’ list and feeling that if there had been more hours in the day we could have made more of it. Five A Side Football 2021 was met with a good reception from the indie game websites that covered it, something that encourages us to stay on this path and see where it leads us.
One step we know we want to take is launching a sequel and adding in a transfer system – ideally we wanted to retro-fit one into the game via an update but the way we’d structured the data carried over from Euro Five A Side Football 2000 meant that players were essentially ‘baked’ into each team and there wasn’t enough time to pull the entire structure of the game apart, re-implement it, and test it thoroughly enough in time for launch without worrying about a ton of bugs coming out of the woodwork.
Pete and I are looking forward to seeing what we can do in the coming year; and in the meantime want to say a big thanks to My FM Story for giving the opportunity to write this, and to you for reading!
Five A Side Football 2021 Links:
App Store: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/id1527649289
Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.SwipeStudios.PremierFiveASideFootball2021
Written by Ross – one half of the duo who created Five A Side Football 2021
My FM Story 
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