Souverän Soccer - This in development footy game for the Amiga looks very decent indeed!

When I was a kid I used to play a lot of Sensible Soccer and Kick Off 2! They were no Fifa's, but playing them on the Amiga was so much fun and just perfect for ball kicking against a friend, without the thuggish behavior of a day out at the local stadium. So why are we mentioning these games you might ask? Well if you check the latest video posted below, you'll be able to see a rather impressive looking in development Amiga game called 'Souverän Soccer'; a game which the developer describes as a "Super Formation Soccer (SNES) like game for unaccelerated stock Amiga 1200 / CD32 and compatible machines (Amiga AGA 020, 14 MHz, no Fast RAM, 50 fps)."

Here is what Daniel Müßener says about the game shown in the video above or linked here

• - Much has been done during the past weeks, worth another wip video. 
• - The city skyline has been removed to make room for more crowd. The tons of previous optimizations made that possible. This has the additional benefit that I don't have to come up with 20+ different skylines for the release...
• - The crowd now consists out of multiple layers, each of them zoomed, scrolled and animated separately. For now there are three such crowd layers. Maybe I'll add even more (they are rather cheap in terms of performance and it's coded to be easily adjustable), but I think three is a pretty good amount.
• - The crowd's zooming is now muuuuch (maybe I need more even more "u"s here) smoother than before. Was a bit tricky but eventually I managed to come up with a solution that doesn't eat up all Chip-RAM 😉
• - The crowd is more colorful. Well, could be even more colorful but because it's a placeholder gfx I didn't put too much effort into it. Just a proof of concept.
• - The formerly blank grey crowd stand is now an adboard. The ad is generated procedurally, the text can be changed at match start.
• - The top goal is now lapping over into the grass and isn't cut-off anymore at the raster-line where the grass begins. This might look like not being a big deal but was really tough. The main reason is that once the copper is inside the grass area it's ultra-busy, all available instructions per line are already used up. But with the top-goal being inside the grass now I had to somehow get some extra sprite-color and -priority changes being done there, things that were done outside the grass before, because the top-goal sprites are being reused for the bottom-goal... Eventually I found a hacky way to get away almost for free without extra copper instructions by doing the color changes before for a different color bank and switch to the right bank at the right point en passant, phew.
• - All lines and circles are more white now and distance fading is smoother here too. Also, the grass texels shine through those lines now, making it all appear much more natural.
• - The crowd / skyline change also implied trashing and redoing the whole stats / message area at the top. All that stuff is now done using hardware-sprites. Was a bit messy because I have to reset and modify those sprites in mid of the crowd-copper-handling now (any other approach would have been even messier). Sprite usage is somewhat tricky here because, well, I don't have too many (5) and I need one for the high-flying ball, so there are 4 sprites remaining. Combined sprites to get 16 colors aren't an option, because I need at least 3 sprites inside the same vertical area (# of goals, time and messages); no, there's not enough room to move the messages down, because the goal is too close if zoomed in. So I ended up using two sprites for the team names + # of goals: one pretty slim one for the team-colors, the other for all the text and numbers. Then one sprite for the match time info. And then two for the messages, one of which is the reused slim team color sprite. The color gradient has been removed (would complicate the copper handling here a lot because we're inside the crowd handling, and the visual gain is questionable anyway), drop shadows have been added.
• - Some more love has been put into the replay function. When switching between replay and normal play a quick curtain effect now better indicates this mode change. The crowd's animation is now slowed down too if in slow-motion replay mode.
• - Played a bit with the sky colors. I want the game to look friendly, not too serious. 
• - Lots of internal stuff, e.g. working around some sprite DMA issues, speeding up the scaling function and much more.
• Greetings to Johnny Ray Worrall who somewhat talked me into reconsidering the crowd / sky area 😉

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