re: Casual mobile football game -- Development updates

Updated player models and ball flight path

I haven't had a lot of time to work on it this past week, but I did get rid of the "nubs" and put in some blocky player models.

I also managed to get pretty close to the visual I had in mind for the flight path of the ball. I couldn't find any built in tools or plugins to sort of "morph" a 3D mesh like that, so I had to figure out all of the vector math and draw it procedurally each frame.

I will have to go through a similar process to draw the shaded areas on the field that will indicate where each player can reach before the ball lands, since they will likewise have to morph/grow/shrink as you move the target spot and change the launch angle. I will probably have to play around with the color and opacity of these areas for a while because there will be so many of them (each player will have one) and they could potentially each cover a substantial chunk of the field. There will be a lot of overlap. I'm thinking maybe each offensive player will have a different color area, but all defenders will be the same shade of grey or red or something like that. But I'm pretty confident that I can make it clear which of your players can actually catch the ball, as well as how well-defended the catch will be.

I'm kind of liking it so far, and I think it will be pretty challenging once I add more players. There will be rushers pressuring the throw. The target zone may be larger if your QB has poor accuracy. The receiver and defender reachable zones may be similarly "fuzzed" if your QB has lower skills (or maybe if the defense is good at disguising their coverage and reach). Maybe there will be boosts to give your players a temporary advantage or whatever.

There are tons of ways to tune the difficulty, so I'm not worried about it being too easy or too hard. I just hope I can make it fun to play, and so far I'm kind of liking the mechanics. But if it's not exciting enough I can do some neat stuff with the camera or make the players explode into blocks when they get hit too hard or some shite like that.