Welcome to our first CLUB Community Update of 2023! And a belated Happy New Year to you all! 🎉
After an incredibly successful 2022, we’ve now moved into a period of building, testing and refining CLUB ready for our soft launch later this year. The CLUB Community has supported us every step of the way so we wanted to give you a bit more of a sense of what’s happening here at Formation Games during this quieter period.
Game Foundations
Last year was a whirlwind, in the best possible way! Our MLS and Season Zero tests provided us with invaluable feedback about our ‘player engine’, which we’ll be taking forward and developing, along with more features and a beautifully redesigned game interface.
With Season Zero over, we should take a moment to celebrate the COs who finished top in our first iteration of CLUB. So a big congratulations to our overall top three:
- Sparta Kendal FC
- Mercia North End
- Real Arsanel Halendonia
…and well done to all of you who finished in the upper reaches of the table. Good work!
Season Zero showed us the appetite you have for stepping into the shoes of a club owner, with picking your players and assembling your team at the very heart of that.
We know you’re all missing playing CLUB, but we’re building for the long term, so a bit of time spent making sure we deliver on our vision is imperative. It also gives us more time to take your feedback into account, which is important to us. We’ll share more information about the building blocks of the game in future updates.
A busy transfer window!
We’re delighted to share that we’ve had a hugely successful January transfer window and added even more world class talent to our growing studio.
John Collins, is our new Creative Director and will lead the game design. John is a veteran in this space and joins us from Space Ape Games, where he was pivotal in growing the global mobile hit title Beatstar — the App Store’s most featured game in 2022.
Martin Korda is one of the most sought-after scriptwriters, narrative designers and story consultants in the games industry. He joins as Narrative Director having previously contributed to numerous critically acclaimed blockbusters including FIFA’s The Journey series, Destiny 2 and Need for Speed Rivals, among many more.
Our in-house development team is now complete with Ryan Moore joining as Lead Systems Engineer. He spent over four years at Sony, building the global analytics platform for PlayStation before joining Media Molecule to run their DevOps and server programming.
You can read more about our new hires here.
Want to join our dream team? We’re currently looking for a Lead UI/UX Designer so take a look at this job posting if that’s your niche.
How’s your ball knowledge?
While our developers get on with the business of developing, we intend to fill the time with some games and competitions for you. The first game has just launched on our socials — Shot or Not?
Every Friday, we’ll give you a selection of players and all you have to do is decide if each of them will have a shot on target during their match at the weekend. Simple right?
If you get all the answers correct, you’ll be in the pot to win a mystery CLUB prize which you can proudly show off to your friends and family as an indicator of your superior ball knowledge. You can enter via our Twitter or Discord channel (yes, you get a bonus entry if you enter via both!)
FIFA Tournament
We were one of 16 football communities invited to take part in the OneFootball FIFA Cross-Community Tournament on 30 January. CLUB was represented by one of our very own COs Jolly, who was edged out in the first round after a really tight match. Big respect to Jolly for taking part and we look forward to providing more of our COs with exclusive opportunities in the future.
What next?
The team has a busy couple of months ahead so don’t be surprised if we go quiet for a little while while we get on and build. We’re likely to need your input on aspects of the game from time to time so look out for surveys and requests for feedback in our Discord (and maybe some sneak peeks too…?)
On behalf of the Formation Games team, we thank you all for your support on this journey so far and look forward to sharing more with you soon!
Until next time,
Formation Games Team
