New Fitba Vid

As part of the DBP entry I had to put a new vid together, I've put in some previously-unseen footage of the player editing, and some new gameplay. Hope you like it...

<a href="http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=c081a423-8dce-4e3d-b2c8-ae4b371239fc" target="_new" title="Fitba">Video: Fitba</a>

Been a bit quiet...

I know, I know, nothing since May, but I do have a good reason, I've been contracting, working on the awesome Flock! back at Proper. Busy as the guys there are finishing up the game I've managed to escape for a couple of weeks working on Fitba, getting it polished up and submitted to the Microsoft Dream Build Play XNA competition. I'll update the demo once I've got my entry submitted so you can all see what I've been up to.

Updated Fitba Demo 1.0.1.34

Big update this time, less under the hood but more in terms of what you see when you're playing the game. First up are headers and overhead kicks - I've put both in & I've put them in without cluttering up the controls any further - what was slide tackle now triggers a header, overhead kick or slide tackle depending on where the ball is in relation to you. Your player will attempt to find his own way to the ball intersection position when attempting to do a header, leaving you free to direct the header where you need it. I was initially loathe to move the player automatically, but I think it feels right, and means that crossing the ball in and getting a header on goal is possible, and very satisfying when it comes off and the ball is nestling in the back of the net.

The other big change is I've added two new camera modes - a side-on more TV style presentation, and a more zoomed out, more tactical view. Nothing too revolutionary, but it does really feel like a different game playing in the different views.



Download the new version on PC or 360 from over on the downloads page.

Enjoy the game.

Updated Fitba Demo 1.0.1.33

Yay, another new version of the PC Demo. This latest version has added some stat tracking. After a game has finished it'll upload some stats to our server, so that I can see how people are playing the game, and it'll help me to hopefully make the game better. There is of course an option to disable this stat tracking in the options menu, and it shouldn't interfere if you don't have an internet connection. There's also been a latest version check put in, so in the future when I put out a new version, the demo should let you know that a newer version is available for download.

If any of this is causing problems with firewalls etc, you can stop the demo from even attempting to communicate externally by holding down the shift key as it starts up.

Other new stuff in this version includes a lighting fix on the players, tweaks to the mouse control, and scuff marks added to the pitch.

Hope you like it, and as always if you have any problems running the demo, or any feedback on the game please get in touch, fritz [at] triplebgames.com, or add your comments here.

Congratulations to our competition winners!

Congratulations to Dean Smith, currently of Newcastle & Wayne Buchan of Fraserburgh for winning one of our amazing Triple B T-Shirts, they've both walked off with one of these. Head over to our clothing store to get one for yourself.

Updated Fitba Demo 1.0.1.32

I've uploaded a new version of the Fitba PC Demo this fixes a missing dependency in the install. You might think that installing the correct versions of DirectX, the XNA framework and the .NET framework would be enough to get an XNA game running on anybody's PC, but no, you also have to ensure that the Visual C++ runtime is installed as well, a step I had missed out. If you've tried the demo in the past and it's failed to run at all this version should fix that.

Also in this version I've added optional mouse control to give those who don't have a 360 pad connected to their PC a better game. You can now move your player with the keyboard and control your players kick direction, slide tackles and change player with the mouse. This allows non-pad players to take shots and make passes in more than the 8 directions allowed by the keyboard. All round I think it's a big improvement for those without a 360 pad.

There are also numerous small changes that have leaked through from the advances that have been going on to the main game. Have fun with it.

Excellent Blender\XNA Tutorial

I've just found this excellent walk-through of creating a skinned model in blender and getting it through to your XNA project. I'd been intending to put something like this together to show how to use the fbx exporter that I'd modified, but this covers everything I could have put in and leaves me free to get on with Fitba. Yay!

Stadium Editing

One of the really important things for me is that it's easy to create and customise teams in Fitba. Since we don't have any licensed teams, we're going to make sure that it's as simple as possible to create and share custom team definitions. I've been working on putting in Stadium Editing and here's a screenshot of the work in progress.

Updated Demo - 1.0.1.31

I've made a small update to the demo, this fixes the bug where a player chasing a ball running away from him would become confused and think he couldn't catch it which resulted in control switching to another player. This is now fixed. If you need to know which version you are running it's displayed in the bottom right hand corner of the title screen.

Fitba Demo Gameplay Movie

Dev Blog

To enable me to keep everybody in the picture with how Fitba's progressing without spamming the e-mail list for every minor change I've decided to keep a devblog, so here it is.