Soccer Nation was to be Crush Ltd’s golden goose in the shape of a football based MMO that allowed both management of teams\clubs, actual real-time management during the matches, as well as allowing the player to participate in the matches as one of the squad and control their player in real-time; this would all happen in a massively multiplayer online game space, which was the big breakthrough idea and which was ahead of its time looking back.
The game was my second title at Crush! and I was given the role of lead (sole) animator on the project after having shown my worth at animating characters during the previous project ‘Skavengerz’.
I already had a pretty thorough knowledge of Softimage3D from my years at the University of Bradford where I’d used the 3D software on a number of personal projects and also taught it’s use; So for this project, which would be relatively heavy in character animation, I managed to convince management to allow me to use Softimage which at the time had just been ported from it’s native Silicon Graphics IRIX platform to Windows NT, which meant we could select a somewhat cheaper hardware platform to run the software.
I spent the best part of around a year hand animating the vast array of motion required for the low poly-count footballers\goalie. There were a few interesting challenges along the way such as having to construct a means to mirror character animation via expressional-constraints due to the lead coder not being able to figure out how to mirror skeletal animation data in code.
The end result was, in truth, a little messy.. The individual components and the over-all idea appeared to work, however when all brought together the game looked clumsy and clunky.
During the development of the game I had a few major life events happen in the shape of death and illness within my immediate family, which caused me to have to move back to my home in Yorkshire for a period of time and work remotely on the project, thus some of the work on Soccer Nation was certainly perhaps not the best I was capable of at the time.
The game also never saw publication after the main investor pulled out of the deal (or so I was led to believe).
Here are some clips of video; The sneaky punch sequence in the first clip still makes me chuckle 😀