I am making a game!

This is a new game I'm working on called Eye of the Match. In it, you play as a virtual referee, and your goal is to inspect football replays to identify and report infringements. I've been developing this project for a while, and I wanted to make a video sharing a bit about how it all came together and talk about some of my future plans for the game. It all started with a simple idea. What if you played as the referee? At first, I imagined that the player would control the field referee. So, actually standing out on the pitch chasing players. The more I thought about it, the more complicated it seemed. I would basically have to build an entire football simulation just to support that one role. But then I was watching a football match and it occurred to me that nowadays they use the VR, the video assistant referee. And that's when it clicked to me. Instead of simulating a match, I could show isolated game situations, almost like little cutscenes while the player controls everything from an office. And as soon as I started thinking about how the actual gameplay loop could look like, my mind naturally went to Paper, Please. It's such an influential game and a great reference on designing systems around inspection and decision-m. So, having that inspiration gave me a solid foundation on how the idea could work. The player receives a match replay, inspects what happened, compares it against the rules, and then issues the report based on those rules. This is when I started prototyping. My first prototypes were focused on figuring out how timeconuming it would be to actually create the cutscenes. You see, this was important because the replays make a huge portion of the game's content. So, producing a lot of them had to be realistic within the project scope. As it turned out, I was pretty happy with how easy they were to put together, which meant I had a solid pipeline for building content. With that foundation in place, I started experimenting with the visual direction of the game. I leaned towards a retrofuturistic aesthetic, heavily inspired by Severance, which I was watching a lot when I started development. And for the graphics for the replays, I wanted to evoke the feeling of classic PS1 games like Winning 11, which I used to play a lot with my family back in Brazil. So everything inside the screens is intentionally more low poly and pixelated. And to connect everything together, I started developing the systems that would let me actually build the story of the game. That meant creating my own tools to trigger dialogue, side events, camera changes, and other moments throughout the experience. The story itself is what I'm actively working on. It follows a virtual referee who's just trying to be the best employee they can be. But as the game progresses, you slowly uncover secrets about the company you work for. And you also have to deal with how angry some of these football fans can get. There's still plenty of work to do, but I can't even begin to describe how excited I am about this game. I recently shared the project on other socials, and the amount of love it's receiving has been completely unbelievable. There couldn't be a better source of motivation to keep pushing forward and making this project the best it can be. I'm working really hard to get the game finished and hope to have it ready as soon as I can. Of course, game development is really hard and I want to be as realistic as I can, but in the meantime, I'm planning to have a demo in the nearby future. So, if you want to be amongst the first to try it, make sure to wishlist Eye of the Match on Steam to receive all the updates. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one. —