• Skysports.com

World Cup Glory

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Client

Skysports.com

Campaign:

World Cup Glory

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Challenge

Skive was commissioned through direct client SkySports.com to deliver a high quality Flash football game to support its World Cup 2006 section.

With many brands piggybacking the World Cup to launch interactive content the challenge was to come up with something slick and stylish, as well as distinctly different.

Execution

Skive decided upon a highly ambitious eleven-a-side football game played from a pseudo 3D isometric perspective, offering one or two player games, friendly or tournament modes, a choice of all 32 competing teams, and the ability to set and amend your team's formation.

The outfield players and goalkeeper were modelled in 3D, and a sequence of animation cycles (for kicking, running and tackling etc) were rendered and exported as .pngs. The game was built in Flash 8, which enabled the use of a single set of player graphics. These were then duplicated and specially tinted internally at run-time to produce the required 32 team kit variations. With Flash 7 it would have been necessary to produce 32 separate sets of graphics – which would ultimately use massive amounts of bandwidth and memory.

The game featured intelligent automatic player selection, toggling to the player nearest the ball. Controls were simple, and featured sprinting, intelligent passing to the nearest player or power-determined long-balls, and sliding tackles.

To enhance the audio, Skive enlisted the help of Sky Sports broadcaster and ex-footballer Chris 'Unbelieve-able!' Kamara, and recorded a sequence of sound bites used throughout as commentary.

The game also featured forward-to-a-friend functionality and a prize draw to win a state of the art DVD and surround sound system.

Results

The game was linked from the SkySports.com World Cup 2006 section, where it had a million plays.

It was also placed on Miniclip.com where it received a further two million plays.

The game has been archived but a temporary link can be made available upon request.