When I started work on the match engine in the early versions of Legacy Manager I contemplated having no match view at all, relying on just an old-school style text display. The early Championship Manager games worked that way, and they were some of the most fun I ever had playing management games.
The engine was always built with a full match representation behind it, I was just hiding it from the player.
But as I played other games on the market, I soon realised that whenever I played on that didn't have at least a 2D engine, I didn't trust that they were actually playing out the games with any kind of realism. They felt like random number generators that just spat out results. So I knew I had to show at least some kind of match view.
Getting started
The first versions of the 2D engine had these ridiculous hand-drawn backgrounds that I spat out to just check that the system was working. They were obviosuly never designed to be used, but I thought the history was a bit of fun. Then on the right, the first proper pitch view that made it in to the early versions of the game.
Players were represented by traditional coloured circles, and the ball was just a dot with a shadow to show height. I didn't take more screenshots at this stage sadly, but if you've played the Championship Manager 4 series, you get the idea.
The pixel art diversion
As mentioned in the UI article (read that at http://legacymanager.net/development/building-a-ui-you-actually-want-to-use if you haven't already) I went on a bit of an old-school pixel art diversion for a while. It was a mistake overall, but it was a bit of fun for a while.
Here you can see the old style pitch with the pixel-art players, the updated pitch to also use a pixel-art style, and on the right the sprite-sheet we designed to cover all of the animations I'd need for each player.
There was one of these for each combination of skin colour, hair colour and style, beard colour and style, and shirt. The engine picked the relevent sprite sheet for each player on the pitch, then the correct animation for each action.
It worked fine, it had a certain charm to it, but I never felt it gave me the flexibility I needed to show matches in a way that felt real.
I stuck with it as I continued to work on the engine logic as it was good enough to allow me to see tactics in action, but I quickly decided that I was going to move on from it once I had got the match logic to a comfortable place.
The switch to 3D
With the engine finally in a place where I was happy enough with how matches were playing, I started work on the 3D view. I built a dedicated match viewer app to help me quickly itterate on it, here's the progress over a couple of weeks.
Things started with a very basic 3D view, with players represented by solid cylinders.
Then a bit of work went in to properly fitting the pitch on screen and adding ad boards around the outside, just to tidy it up a bit.
The next big leap was adding a pitch texture, and the first version of our animated players. I hired a designer to build a basic 3D player model, then added skin and hair colours automatically to the models based on the data we held for the players.
More camera angles came next, along with proper day/night options.
Then a change in the UI to allow us to show matches in almost full screen, ready to slot it back in to the game itself
The match views are all just different angles on the exact same game, so it allowed me to easily add in a top down version for those that prefer the older style of top-down management. Shadows have been toned down since this version, they were far too distracting at this angle!
The finally, stadiums and on-screen animations such as starting lineups, goals, full time scores etc.
Stadium sizes and colours are customised for every team, helping to make the in-game immersion better.
There are some more views to show you at a later date, including a split screen view that shows your match alongside in-game data, multiple different camera angles from around the stadium, replays, and other nice little quality-of-life enhancements. But I thought some of you might just enjoy seeing how the match view has progressed over the development, and how we got to where we are today.
If you're interested in playing the game when it launches soon, drop your email in the box below and you'll be notified as soon as it's ready!