Thanks to everyone who has tried the game and wishlisted it in the past few weeks. A lot of new players have discovered the game since the Cupdate - really happy most of you seem to be enjoying it.
Drunken FC started out as an experiment by me (Andras of Red Herring Labs), based on a joke. Back in 2012 a coder friend of mine threw together a silly little 'game', where you could poke a ragdoll character sitting at a desk, and make him fall to the ground. It was based on the real-life behaviour of a co-worker who kept falling asleep at his desk each Monday. We called it 'The Monday Simulator'. Being an inside joke, it had no afterlife, but it gave me an idea of a hungover game developer character walking across the office and knocking stuff over.
I quickly made a rig in Unity, and the Drunken FC walking mechanic was born. It was unplayable and no fun to control, but the spark was there. As I was putting in stuff to knock over, I eventually put in some spheres to kick around. And thus Drunken FC was born. The core game mechanic shifted instantly from stumbling around in the office to playing soccer.
In the next few years, the game grew and matured. But life kept throwing obstacles at me, so development eventually slowed down. Over time it’s become clear that I don’t have enough time to keep building it myself, and to bring it to its full potential. That’s why I’m happy to announce that starting today, I'm handing over the game's development to a publisher: Sloppy Games.
This is a new outfit run by my friends Sebastian, Sebastian (yes, there’s two of them), Gustav, Daniel and Daniel (two of them too), who share my love for scrappy, funny games. They built the recent Cupdate (adding national teams, colours and sponsors to the game), the improved controller support that was rolled out yesterday and the most recent trailer.
All in all, they’ve shipped more bugfixes and updates in the past three weeks, than I managed in the past three months...
While Sloppy will lead on the game from here on out, I am still invested in the game’s success, and I will definitely stay involved in the background, giving guidance and advice.
The road to 1.0
While we’re now more than one person working on the game, we’re still a small team, and all of us have day jobs to manage, so don’t expect massive changes. That said, we’re confident we can push the game a little further and deliver a fun 1.0 with more boozy antics.
Here's what we're committing to on the way to a full 1.0 release:
Regular content updates. New stuff added to the game, on a steady rhythm.
Unlockables. Things to chase, collect and show off.
Console. Drunken FC belongs on the couch. Console is the natural home for that, so this is our main goal. We don’t yet know if we’ll be allowed to release the game on some platforms (because of the booze), so we’ll update as soon as we have progress.
A word on online multiplayer
We’ve always thought of Drunken FC as a local multiplayer game first. Online multiplayer is the thing people ask about most, so here's the answer: building this properly is expensive and time-consuming, and we're not going to promise something we can't deliver well.
Realistically, it only becomes possible if the game reaches serious numbers (meaning we can pay someone to spend serious time on it) - somewhere in the region of 50,000 copies. If we get there, we'll take a proper run at it. Until then, we'd rather nail the couch experience than ship online badly.
Thank you
Thanks to all of you who have downloaded the game, played it, posted clips and dragged friends into a match. If you’re enjoying Drunken FC, please consider leaving a review on Steam. This will help other people discover the game and (hopefully) give it a try.
Please also join us on Discord! Especially if you have feedback - good or bad - we’d love to hear it, since most of our decisions on what to develop will come directly from the community.
See you on the pitch, drinks in hand.
/Sloppy Games & Red Herring Labs