It has taken almost five years of Phaser/Firebase/Midjourney game development to get to this point, after Mr Football started in 2009 as a Web browser game. I am very pleased to open sign-ups for the Mr Football closed beta.
You are in an alternate timeline that diverged from our own back in the 1980s. Allen Aylett and Ross Oakley failed in their plans to turn the VFL into a national competition. Grassroots footy supporters staged a revolt, leading to the dissolution of not only top tier leagues but also all suburban and regional leagues. The sport survives and indeed thrives, but the concept of centralised leagues run by suits in boardrooms is permanently on the nose.
You are the coach of a new community team somewhere in Australia. Any club from any city, suburb or town can become the best in the country in this strange and unfamiliar footy landscape. Have you got the belief, skill, guts and determination to become Mr Football?
Mr Football is a hybrid game, combining various elements of some very dissimilar game genres:
- Football Manager style coach simulation, in this case for Australian rules football, where you are not controlling the players directly in arcade style but must watch them play from the sidelines as the coach;
- A match rule set based heavily on Blood Bowl relying on hundreds of six-sided dice rolls;
- A hero collector system of player characters in an RPG-like framework of XP, levels and item equipping, working off the original template of Summoners War but most similar to Star Trek Timelines;
- Asynchronous PvE and PvP matches, playing against teams in automated matches like a raft of RPGs such as Dislyte, AFK Arena, RAID: Shadow Legends and the like.
- A mission-style mode testing players’ intangible personalities, which is a departure for most sports games but is again based on Star Trek Timelines and its Missions.
- Weekly events introducing new player cards;
- A seasonal system similar to EA Sports FC (formerly FIFA), where most game assets are wiped from year to year.
For those unaware, beta is a term in software for an application with basic functionality, possibly with bugs and crashes still to iron out, and an unfinished feature set. Early Access games on Steam are also in beta mode, for instance, prior to their official release. For Mr Football, the core game loop of Recruit-Boot-Loot is in place for the Campaign match mode… but even if that is largely unbuggy now, there is still so much more to add.
To emphasise: this is a closed beta, so entering your email in the form below does not automatically get you in. I will be admitting coaches on a needs basis… my needs as a game developer, not just yours as a budding coach! 🙂