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SFL Interactive talk putting on a freestyle show with Street Power Football
We catch up with the team behind ace arcade freestyle soccer title Street Power Football to talk modes, features and superpowers.
For decades, football games have been dominated by increasingly lifelike sims, capturing every strained sinew, ridiculous haircut and overly-zealous referee with realism so painstaking you almost expect Geoff Shreeves to pop up from behind the sofa to grill you after your latest humiliating defeat.
While football is a very serious business, it's easy to forget that it’s supposed to be, well, fun. Freestyle football seems to grasp this fact, foregoing the dogged stoicism and soundbites about taking things one step at a time in favour of incredible tricks, a bright, brilliant culture and stars who seem to be actually enjoying themselves. With all this in mind, it's perhaps a surprise that so few games have tried to tap into the bountiful charms of the street football scene. That is, until the upcoming Street Power Football arrives on August 25, 2020.
Working closely with a number of freestyle luminaries, including Séan Garnier and Liv Cooke, Street Power Football is the brainchild of French publishers SFL Interactive and looks to capture the larger-than-life joy of freestyle football by offering a game that's less intensely realistic and more brilliantly arcade-like.
We caught up with SFL's CEO Michael Sportouch to find out more about the game and how it will bring the explosive, improvisational world of freestyling to consoles and PC.
Take on all challengers in Street Power Football
© SFL Interactive
Bringing the street home
The decision to create a football game that wasn't necessarily interested in pinpointing how Cristiano Ronaldo strikes a freekick initially seems a risky one. Sportouch, however, explains just how Street Power Football sprang to life.
"The team at SFL are big footy fans and passionate about the sport, but the starting point for Street Power Football came when I saw my kids watching videos on YouTube and Instagram of Séan [Garnier] and other freestylers," he says. "I looked at the numbers of views and subscribers and was really surprised, because my first thought was that freestyle was quite niche. I realised there was a huge following and so many people interested in freestylers and their skills."
Inspired by this discovery, Sportouch met Garnier in Paris, with the goal of understanding his background, his introduction to the sport and "just to let him talk about the culture of freestyle and street football."
After the success of this initial meeting, a designer was then enrolled to work closely with Garnier, while the team looked at the football gaming market and the different titles available. It was here that Sportouch and the team at SFL decided to opt for an arcade-style approach.
"There’s obviously a big market for sims," Sportouch explains. "However, we saw a huge opportunity for something different and more arcade-y, with a different feel and flavour. When we met Séan, we gained a deeper understanding of freestyle culture and this is where we laid the foundations of the project.
"During our second meeting, he said our concept was great, but that he thought we were missing different disciplines – the likes of Panna, Trickshot, Elimination – the games street players organise on the playground. He really challenged and pushed us to create more game modes to offer players all the different types of freestyle culture and styles. He was really pivotal in the way we designed the game."
5 games in one
As a result of these conversations with Garnier, the SFL team worked to include several different game modes that would represent these disciplines.
Freestyle is pretty much what it sounds like, with the player having to perform a series of tricks to get a high score and you can also compete 1v1 in a battle to see who has the smoothest moves. Trickshot sees you having to hit targets dotted around different arenas (named Playgrounds) within a time limit, with some targets hidden behind, or even inside objects.
A Street Power Match is a more straightforward 2v2 or 3v3 put-the-ball-in-the-net scenario (with an incredible twist we'll come to shortly). Panna is a 1v1 contest in which you score one point by putting the ball in the net, or two points through a 'panna', which in layman terms is the ultimate indignity – the nutmeg.
Become a King is a career mode, where the player is mentored by none other than Séan Garnier, while Elimination is played on one half of the playground in 1v1, with two team-mates on the bench. Every time you score a goal, the opposing player is eliminated and must leave the field. It's suitably anarchic and fast-paced.
Given the disparity between these game modes, how challenging was it to deliver a package that was representative of freestyle football as a whole? "When Sean said we need to include Panna, we ended up creating almost five or six different games in one," Sportouch responds.
Bring on the nutmegs
© SFL Interactive
Sportouch explains that each mode requires totally different AI, whether it's the players you don't control in a Street Power Match pushing to help you score a goal, or the ones you're competing against in Panna, who must understand that putting the ball in the net is one point, but a nutmeg is worth two. The vast difference between these modes makes the game richly varied, but was a challenge to realise for the developers. And that’s before we get to the superpowers.
"From the beginning of the project we wanted to add an arcade twist and one of the ways we do that is by allowing players to activate superpowers in Street Power Match," Sportouch says.
In this mode, specific actions and tricks fill your Power Bar, which you then activate to unleash hugely OTT powers – either offensive or defensive – that can swing a match in your favour.
"We wanted this to be really original, blending traditional football sims with superhero games where you activate superpowers," Sportouch adds. "Each player has a unique power, so you also have to be strategic in your choice. You might select Melody Donchet, because she has this power that could help me in this certain situation. It's a bit like the Avengers – Cap has his shield, Thor has his hammer – you want to get the right combo of powers, choosing players wisely and creating your own strategy."
A quick glance at the powers demonstrates exactly what Sportouch means regarding the arcade feel, with each power suitably outlandish and spectacular, making for games that are wildly unpredictable. Garnier, for example, will teleport from one place in the playground to another. Indeed, unpredictability is the constant through every discipline of street football, but how do you capture this sense of spontaneity and unbound creativity in a video game?
Free to freestyle
While football itself may have its unpredictable moments, there are only so many outcomes. In freestyle, anything goes, however and creativity is more than a beautifully weighted through ball from a diminutive number 10. It's the foundation upon which the sport is built.
Throughout their work together, Sportouch emphasises the level of focus maintained by Garnier on ensuring that the fundamentals of freestyle were captured. Nowhere is this more clearly seen than in the Freestyle mode itself.
"With Freestyle mode, Séan challenged us to make realistic animations, especially when capturing the transition of a player moving from the floor to upper positions," Sportouch explains. "We had to create the tools to allow the player to do that. Originally, we wanted to dictate the moves the players would have to create, a bit like the dancing games in an arcade. However, you're not deciding the moves you're doing. Instead, you're following the moves the computer is telling you to do."
This is where Garnier stepped in.
"Séan was really passionate about the fact that in a freestyle competition, like Red Bull Street Style, you have to create your own combination of moves. So, you can play it safe and say you're going to do some easier but less rewarding moves for the jury in terms of points, or you could try much more complicated combinations with the risk that you could make some mistakes. However, if i do it well, you'll beat your opponent. That spirit of risk and reward, and giving the players the opportunity to create their own run and combine between 90 moves that we've captured is really the driver behind the creation of the Freestyle mode."
The world's your playground in Street Power Football
© SFL Interactive
Along with the huge number of combinations possible in Freestyle mode, Sportouch and his team also created a jury system that understands the risk versus reward approach so prevalent in real freestyling. Now, the harder the move you try, the more points you'll get – provided you don’t fall on your face while doing it, of course. The mode rewards style and difficulty, with multipliers in place to calculate your score. Not only that, but your score is then uploaded to a global leader board, where you can compete with the rest of the world.
As for capturing the creativity so abundant in freestyle competitions, Sportouch says: "You have to hit a certain number of button combinations for each move and ensure slick movements. The challenge for players is learning these. We've created 90 moves, so we believe that what we've made is quite challenging.
"It’s easy to pick up and perform a couple of moves, but memorising the Windmill, which is a kind of breakdancing move, or the Boyka flip-jump, where you put the ball between your knees and do a somersault, is much more complicated," he continues. "So, you have to learn the moves and then perform them at the right time. For beginners, it can be quite intimidating, but once they've learned the techniques, it’s a very rewarding, skill-based experience. We believe, over time, it'll give the players a much deeper gameplay experience."
A bulging roster of freestyle icons
Any freestyle game worth its salt would have to pay tribute to the icons of the game and Street Power Football absolutely does this. Featuring the 25 best freestylers, panna and street football players in the world, Sportouch and SFL worked closely with the likes of Garnier, Michał Rycaj ('MichRyc'), Soufiane Bencok and Aguska Mnich to capture a variety of moves and styles for players to enjoy.
Pick your freestyle icon in Street Power Football
© SFL Interactive
However, Sportouch once again emphasises the team's desire to build an arcade experience, rather than a simulation.
"In the game you can play as any one of the 25 official street players, but you can also select Street Power Heroes, which are our own superhero-style characters," he explains. "We had a discussion when creating the game and came to the conclusion that it would be limiting from a gameplay perspective if players could only use Séan's moves when playing as him. Whoever you select, all the styles and moves are available. We wanted to make sure that success in the game is not down to the character you select, but rather down to your skills and performance. We don't want to limit players in their choice."
The console question
Finally, with the game set for release on current platforms as the year tilts towards its end, it would be remiss of us not to ask whether there was a temptation to also bring Street Power Football to next-gen. The discussion, it seems, is still ongoing, with Sportouch explaining that when they started the project two years ago, the next gen development kits were not available, so all energy was focussed on existing platforms. This may be changing however.
"We're hopefully going to be looking at next-gen platforms, but we’re not going to rush," Sportouch says. "If we bring Street Power Football to next-gen, we need to think about how we can take advantage of this tech. New technology, like the very sophisticated controller on the PS5 with Haptic Feedback, could be really interesting for what we are doing, especially for the Freestyle mode, but it would require very specific design. What we don't want is to take Street Power Football and just improve the graphics a little bit. We want to have a very specific design to take advantage of the possibilities of these consoles and this means that it will take time."
Backwards compatibility, though, means that even those who make the move during the early days of next-gen will still be able to get their freestyle fix and with Street Power Football offering up a brilliantly arcade twist to the familiar football formula, you won't want to miss out.
Street Power Football is hitting PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and PC on August 25, 2020.
