Become the ultimate football fan!

This is my submission for GMTK Game Jam 2023. It was made without a game engine and written in TypeScript. Visuals and programming were done by myself, and the sound effects are royalty free ones found online.

Controls

Q, W, E, R, T, Y - activate a specific sector of fans. Blue players near this sector will get stat boosts from hearing you cheer.

SHIFT - make the fans boo instead of cheering. Red players near a booing sector will get have lower stats from hearing you boo.

The green bars represent crowd energy. Energy slowly regenerates naturally and regenerates fast after a goal.

Theme

This game fits the theme of "Roles reversed", because in other football games (e.g. FIFA) you take the role of the team, but in my game you play as the fans. They do not control the outcome directly, however by their cheers and boos they influence player stats like speed, accuracy and control.

Technology

The most challenging part of the project was simulating a football game. Turns out there is a lot that goes into it. I still haven't got it 100% right, but that's ok, it's a jam game. Every player has a list of possible intents like "move to defensive position" or "pass ball". They rank the intents based on what is happening and then execute the best one.

Another interesting part is the visuals of the characters. The image assets are actually svg files that include handlebars template syntax. In runtime for each character on screen the template is filled with information about the skin colour, hair colour, shirt colour, etc. In this way there can be a large variety of people on screen without a lot of different images.