The summit or other

A long time ago I wrote something about climbing a mountain. I can't find the blog entry now but basically I was waffling on about how much work I had ahead of me to create New Star Soccer 4. Well, I am nearly at the summit of said mountain and boy is it getting hard to breathe! I'm having sleepless nights worrying about how it will be received by the fans,  if I can release it bug free and wether it will plug the hole in my bank account.

Right now I have a small group of testers that are making sure everything works correctly and letting me know what changes or additions need to be made. I think I have squashed all the bugs in the match engine, although there may be one left where players go on a conga dance around the ten yard zone during a free kick. It's hard to pin this one down and it may even have been fixed inadvertently whilst fixing something else, but we'll keep a look out for it.

I've actually been working quite a lot on the match engine trying to improve the gameplay and hopefully it's a big step forward from the public betas I released earlier this year. There is now an option for basic or advanced dribbling. Basic dribbling makes the ball stick to your feet at all times. Advanced dribbling means the ball is knocked forward if you are sprinting. There is also and option that will automatically guide your player to the ball when it is passed to him. This can help quite a lot in the much improved Player Cam view as the camera pans around. Also it can improve the flow of passing whilst playing as the team in a Quick Match - although experienced players will probably want full control of their players.

Nick (JJU) is putting the finishing touches on the database and when he's done we will be able to thoroughly test the Champions League and UEFA Cup competitions. This is the last real concern I have about the game code as the fixture creation and progression is the most complicated area of the whole game. We just need to make sure that every year the correct teams qualify for the right competitions and everything plays out without any fixture clashes. Aside from that it's just a case of playing it now, racking up a few seasons to make sure that sponsorships, relationships with women, having children, loans, transfers and so on all work correctly and don't cause any major issues. I'm sure there will be a few bug fixes and tweaks to be made post-release but as long as people don't have to restart their careers I'll be happy.

So when? I mentioned October on the forum and that is still the plan. That gives us another 10 days of testing and I may even let eager forum members help out with the final testing. For now though I need to get back to work or that mountain peak won't get any closer! 

PS For those that may not have seen it, here is the NSS4 Promo Video. There are also some new screenshots here.