Hi Folks,
I hope everyone is enjoying the turn of the weather and the start of the NFL season! I wanted to share what we’ve been working on for the past few months. In April, we started a three part series where we unveiled some of the gameplay changes we had been working on. After a brief delay, we’re finally ready to share the third and final part of the series: Routes, Plays, and Playbooks.
Our goal with this series of updates was to raise the overall quality and fidelity of the gameplay on the field. We wanted the players to make better decisions, we wanted their movements to be more dynamic, and we wanted them to look better doing it! In the first two parts of this series, we already shared that we added run, pass option plays to the game and completely overhauled the QB / RB handoff animation sequence. In this final update, we’re going to take a broader look at offensive plays.
Routes
Our goal with Axis Football is to replicate the highest levels of professional football. When we compared our offensive playbooks with what we were seeing in professional football, there was a big gap. This starts with individual route assignments. Simply put, our routes and instructions were basic, covering only what a pee-wee team might need. Axis 2026 will contain loads of new (and more modern) types of routes and blocking assignments. You can expect sluggos, crooked routes, whips, angles, tables, spots, and much, much more. While new routes are fun, the feature we’re most excited about in this category is the addition of new Block and Release (BAR) routes. These routes will show up in blue on your pay art and designate that a player (RB or TE, usually) will first look to pass block for a short period of time before releasing to run the designated route. BAR routes are versatile tools for an offense, as they allow for protection against a potential pass rush without the downside of keeping too many blockers back to defend. I can tell you from a lot of play testing these routes, they’re a lot of fun and create a lot of dynamic plays!
Plays
The next step up from individual routes is plays. If our routes were basic, then our plays were outdated – much better suited to capturing football around the turn of the century. This led to predictable gameplay that rarely flashed moments of surprise. To fix that, we needed to overhaul the plays and the way we organized the data that comprised a play within the game. To make a long story short…er, the solution in this case was to completely revamp the entire code structure for how play data was stored and transferred to players. This meant that every single play from Axis 2024 was removed… and we started from scratch.
Beginning with formations, there are now over 75 offensive configurations (nearly doubling what the previous Axis had). More importantly, the personnel within these formations much better aligns with current professional football. You will see 2 RB sets, 2 and 3 TE sets, modern uses of FBs and more! We’ve made likewise changes to the depth chart to support these improvements, but that’s a topic for another update. For each of the 75+ offensive formations, you can expect there to be an average of 15-20 plays per formation. That totals to a number that is well in excess of double the size of the plays in the previous Axis. Furthermore, with the addition of the new routes above, we’ve been able to create a much more dynamic set of plays that better captures the wide array of offensive strategies that a lot of different teams employ. You’ll see draws, misdirections, designed QB runs, modern route combinations, and so much more!
Playbooks
With the update to the plays and formations available, we were able to make similar changes to the playbooks. In an effort to provide better strategic options out of the box, we’ve increased the number of default playbooks available. As with the previous Axis version, you will be able to utilize the built-in playbook editor to manually craft new playbooks from scratch or edit the provided ones to suit your individual team(s) needs. I will note here that we are also making several improvements to the play calling weights that control how the AI select plays, but that will come in a later update.
Player Behavior & Logic
The work for this update took quite some time. Hand-coding over one thousand individual plays takes a lot of time, but the real reason this update was so long in coming is because of the freedom I allowed myself when making the plays – a freedom that I haven’t been afforded when working under a yearly release schedule. Let me explain. My workflow for adding new plays was to focus on a single formation and code three plays at a time. Once a set of plays was coded, I tested each one several times against different defensive sets to make sure players were doing the correct thing. And that’s where the rabbit holes started popping up… In the past, I was forced to have a higher threshold for what was considered acceptable player movement and behavior, due to the fact that I couldn’t allow myself to be derailed from the current project or feature I was working on. As I tested these new plays, I didn’t have a looming release pressuring me to disregard the slight errors or issues I noticed. When I didn’t like the way players looked coming off the ball (combined with previous feedback that player acceleration was unnatural), I implemented new animations for players coming out of their stances. When players made illogical blocking assignments, I rewrote the decision-making or handled the edge cases that the defense presented. When I didn’t like the way hitch routes worked, I scraped the current system and rewrote it. There were many more examples.
What happened over the months, as the new animations and improved movements gradually raised the collective bar of the acceptable standard, I continued to find small areas to improve. And that’s how an update that was intended to be finished a months ago stretched into the fall months of 2024. I am very pleased with how everything has improved, and I know we will continue to iterate on the gameplay as our new standard for excellence drives us forward. Let me leave you with a short video of a sample play that illustrates some of the improvements mentioned above. I didn’t record this video with the intention of using it here, but I think it fits nicely in this update.
As always, we would love to hear your feedback! Feel free to reach out to us using any of the platforms below!
Discord: https://discord.gg/YFuF9TSZKV
Twitter / X: https://twitter.com/axisfootball?lang=en
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AxisGames/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theaxisfootball/
Best,
Danny Jugan
President & Lead Developer, Axis Games