Técnico 2000

This was my final project when I graduated in Data Processing Technology (P15) at PUC-RIO University. I made the first ever made Soccer Manager game with 3D animations in Delphi 3, which had also my own music and sound effects, but 3D animations and the logo were made by some friends. It was made entirely from scratch. The full project/development was between 1997-1999.

The game was based on the idea of ​​making a manager game that was actually fun to play, not the kind where you skipped to the end to find out the result of the match. The result was a demo version, in which you received the list of players from your club, and you had to choose the main team with each position, and also the reserves. Then you would play a friendly match against a CPU-controlled team, which was actually very good, selected by me with players similar to those available to the player.

The main idea of ​​the game was to convey the excitement of a football match, even without playing… but how could you do that in a manager game without it becoming boring to watch a bunch of idiotic puppets running around without any sense of connection until one team scored a goal, like most games of the same type at the time?

The logic was simple, but it was very well balanced and fair. First, it was decided which team would start with the ball, with a 50% chance for each side. Then, the midfielder starts the game with possession of the ball. Then, the data of this player is compared with his marker (if there is one). If they are 100% equal, both will have a 50% chance of leaving there with the ball. If not, whoever has more points will have more chances than the other.

So if he passes, he will have 2 to 3 options to pass the ball to another player. And again, the data is compared, position by position, player by player, until it reaches the point between the attacker and the goalkeeper. Then, if the attacker wins, we have a GOAL!

Ok, now that the CPU knows what happened, that is, whether the attacker scored the goal or not, then an animation will be selected to be displayed, and that is the great trick that makes this game really fun to play. If one day it were produced… there would be thousands of very well-made animations with great plays that are quite realistic, like a normal soccer match. They could even be real videos of players executing them on a real field, and each play would have at least 20 different endings, and many others the same beginning, thus giving the illusion to the player that they will never know what will actually happen. All animations are divided into 3 levels.

For example, if we only had 3 types of moves (we would have at least 100 if the game were produced)

  • Penalty Kick
  • Corner Kick
  • Counterattack

So the Penalty Kick type is chosen randomly, and since the CPU knows whether the attacker scored the goal or not, it will choose one of the animations for this type of play, one that matches the result of this play. But before that, the CPU will send an alert telling the player that a Penalty has occurred!

After the alert that a penalty will be taken, the correct animation will be displayed… if it was a goal, it will display an random animation from the Green List, otherwise it will display one from the Red List. And so it goes until the end of the first half and the match. Since the player will never know the result of the animation, only knowing what is shown on the screen… he will have the same emotion as watching a real football match, hoping that his attacks end in a goal, and getting sad every time a chance is missed.

For this demo, only two animations were made with the same play, but one ending in a goal, and the other with the ball going out. This was because of the time and money limitations to make them at that time, and again, this was just a demo of the project to present my idea, not the full game.

If you want to test it, this version will not have the songs because it was a data/music CD, like most games of that time to save RAM for the game and playing the CD would not consume almost any resources of my poor Pentium 100mhz with 80mb of RAM and an amazing 1mb IDE video card that I had in late 1998. But if you put any music CD, it will use the first three songs for the game.

Just unzip it into a directory and install it as if it were any other game, following the instructions on the screen. The game is entirely in Portuguese, and it’s just a demo. It was made/compiled with a Windows XP 16 bits, so probablly you will need to do something to make it work in modern Windows.

The game received a grade 10/10 but only a 7/10 on the documentation, giving me a final grade of 8.5/10, a great grade for a final project at PUC-RIO, the highest grade someone got that day. Later, my project was selected as one of the best of the year, and demonstrated at a fair held by the University the following year.

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