Today we released version 1.0 of the game! It's finally out, officially, with all content and all features! We made it in time for the World Cup 2026, pfew.
For those who want the full story, check out the devlog (or "developer's diary") on my blog:
https://pandaqi.com/blog/videogames/commercial-releases/super-sub-franchise/super-sub-world-cup/
It details all the ideas, problems, different versions, reasons for (not) doing something, etcetera. Beware: it's 15,000 words of pure game dev info.
I'll also publish a long article on that blog about the journey towards our first Steam game release in the near future. It's not available yet because I want to add the results (statistics, sales, etc) from the launch week to close it out.
For those who want the much shorter update, read on!
What's inside?
A game that blends sports, arcade, incremental, and idle in unique ways.
It's available on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
You can play it with mouse, keyboard, touchscreen, or controller.
Most modes contain 28 matches to play, each one slightly harder than the previous. The special World Cup mode simulates an actual world cup with 8 matches to play of increasing difficulty (group stage -> final).
An upgrade tree with 100-150 different upgrades (the number depends on the mode you play). They help you get stronger, faster, more accurate, and possibly break the rules to try and win those matches. You can buy different player types, different ball types, and more to fit your tactics or playstyle. You just need to score enough goals to earn enough money to buy them :)
It contains 10 unique modes. The regular mode is quite chill and casual. An even more chill mode is the one where you have no opponents or no clock. The World Cup mode has the opponent fighting back and is hard to beat. Or try the Roguelike mode where failing once means the end, or one of the more silly playful modes such as Hands or Random.
There are 4 fully-featured save slots, allowing saving anytime, so you don't have to finish games in one go.
You can tweak the experience in the settings. Example: turn off screen shake, turn off the helper/tutorial images, or change perspective to simplified top-down view.
And it contains 60 countries to play.
Boot the game and immediately start having fun. The gameplay is so simple it doesn't need a tutorial. But to win the world cup, to beat the final team in the final, you will need to become a fully upgraded master coach ...
What changed (since the first demo)?
The demo only had the first few matches. The matches after it were already finished, but tested far less often than the start. (Because of the same reasons as always: playtesters didn't get that far in the available time + early matches were already "testable" much earlier.)
We already fixed most of these things with the updated demos a few weeks before release!
Thus, the list below is mostly about big/important changes from the very first demo to this final game.
* The later matches became smaller and simpler. It was just too overwhelming when the final match had 11 vs 11 players. Too much stuff happens! So we "compressed" the game to make the maps and teams smaller, such that the final game is easier to manage (... if you have upgraded enough, of course). The goal was to allow many different upgrade paths towards the final (instead of just requiring "all upgrades in this exact order"). This took a while to balance for difficulty and broken combinations. It took longer, at least, than in games with a more standard approach to skill trees/upgrades.
* Another thing that helped here was reducing visual noise. For example, in the demo the "kicking range" of all players was always shown. Though kicking is obviously an important part of the game ... most of the time, a specific player is not kicking (or even able to kick). Simply hiding these circles when irrelevant cleaned up the visuals a lot.
* The top-down perspective received all the sprites it needed to support different player types. (Those were simply not implemented yet in the demo.)
* Several elements of the game had unclear feedback or no feedback at all. We knew this about some late-game upgrades/mechanics, but you're always a bit blind-sided about the visuals of things you've implemented weeks ago and have been seeing day in day out ;) We spent some time making feedback consistent, adding more of it, and making it look more responsive/nicer in general. Example: Once accuracy is introduced, it tells you "PERFECT!" or "BAD TOUCH!" when your accuracy is particularly great or terrible.
* We added button hints for controller, which finishes controller support. (We added more keys to navigate around the game in general, mostly focused on the upgrade screen.)
* The fouling/injury/stamina system has been in a weird state since the start of development. It worked, sure, but playtests showed players were hesitant to use it at all. It's a trade-off mechanic---fouling can remove an OPPONENT off the field but also remove YOU---and that feels like a negative to some players. Ever since implementing it we've looked for ways to make this part of the game positive enough that players want to use it. In hindsight the best solutions were quite obvious: directly reward you for aggressive actions, place the systems on specific matches instead of the upgrade tree, use different player types and modes to regulate the systems better.
What's next?
We believe in making the full game and releasing it in a finished state. None of those vague promises or early access that never ends. Super Sub: World Cup is a finished game that contains all our best ideas.
At the same time, nothing is perfect, and there are always more ideas (or just "I wonder if ...").
This game has so many different ways to play, so many unique upgrades that play with the rules of soccer, so many countries and mechanics should you choose to use them, that we simply can't test every possible combination. Many plays are required to find any remaining bugs, or problematic upgrade paths, or further improvements.
As such, to answer the question of "what's next?", we can say,
We will be supporting the game for several months to fix bugs, improve the experience, and finetune it further. As they say: no game survives contact with the wild. All the internal playtesting in the world can't find issues as quickly as thousands of players trying the game on day one.
We're looking to create more "Super Sub" games. We're excited to take this Super Sub mechanic into different directions. Use the many lessons learned in a fresh game. Why stop at a World Cup? Why stop at purely offline singleplayer play? Why stop at soccer/football? The idea of simplifying sports down to "click to sub someone on/off" feels very potent. The combination with upgrades is addictive as well. We're exploring all the options here, but haven't settled on anything definitive as of this moment.
I hope you give the game a try. I wish you a lot of fun exploring all it has to offer and trying to win that prized World Cup trophy :)
I also wish you a lot of fun watching the real world cup tournament going on right now.
Until the next update,
Pandaqi