Back in play: The making of Speedball 2 Evolution

A game that made its reputation in the UK in 1980s and 1990s as one of the first fantasy sports titles to gain widespread acclaim, Speedball has since been remade for many platforms.

But its release in February 2011 for iOS raised plenty of questions in terms of how to combine such fast-moving action with touchscreen controls.

We caught up with Jon Hare from UK publisher Tower Studios and Remigiusz Koscielny from Polish developer Vivid Games to find out more about the process.

Remigiusz Koscielny: Founded in 2003, Vivid Games is a console and mobile developer and publisher of high quality games and applications. We've worked with many leading publishers and operators and successfully brought over 150 games to the market.

We have experience, in-depth market knowledge, extensive and proven technology - everything which is so important to execute great new games and challenges.

Jon Hare: Speedball is a classic futuristic sports game - a combination of rollerball and pinball, played on a metallic ice hockey-like pitch - by one of the UK's greatest development teams of the 80s and 90s The Bitmap Brothers.

The game was originally made for the Commodore 64; this was followed by the better version on the Amiga released in 1991.

I've worked very closely with Mike Montgomery for over 20 years. He's now the sole owner of The Bitmap Brothers, and in 2004, Mike and I set up Tower Studios with John Philips (also ex-Bitmaps). However, in 2009, Mike and John left Tower to pursue other interests and I became sole owner of Tower Studios.

By the end of 2009, I mentioned to Mike that I would like to remake Speedball 2 with Vivid Games and Mike agreed to this plan - in fact Speedball is just the first of the Bitmap games we have plans for. So my involvement has been to put everything together from a business point of view, to creatively direct the game, and to keep all parties in conversation at all times.

RK: From a business perspective, Speedball 2 is one of the best known retro-brands, at least in Europe, so as soon as we got in touch with Jon and heard about the opportunity to work on The Bitmap Brothers' catalogue, this was a no brainer for me.

The other reason is more sentimental, simply that this was one of my favourite Amiga games when I was younger.

JH: I think it was just a case of getting the tackling right and then ramping up the special effects - having the right animation and tuning the ultimate distance from which you can smash your opponent to the ground.

Beneath the surface, it is the equivalent to a sliding tackle in Sensible Soccer but with the tackling player staying on his feet and throwing a punch instead of going to ground.

That's just about the only real violent thing in the game apart from knocking your opponents over with the Chargeball.

JH: No, I think we got everything in and added a lot more. The only thing really missing is two player over the internet, which wasn't in the original anyway and is very, very difficult to pull off without any lag, which would kill such a fast game.

RK: I agree with Jon; we included everything we wanted to have in the game Thanks to so many well balanced and polished features, this is one of the best retro remakes available.

RK: We haven't had any major obstacles with the gameplay, however, I think we started producing the menus too quickly, which caused us double the workload in the end.

We spent too little time on transforming the original Amiga screen-sized menus to the smaller touchscreens. This wouldn't have been possible without the commitment of our team - who deserve a big thank you for this!

All of the rules are from the original so there's not a lot of innovation there, although a fair amount of tuning was required to get things just right, and we did decide to add a few new competitions early on and the inter-planetary teams.

The bulk on innovation was in the menus, which were redesigned a number of times throughout to development to improve layout and fit them onto the smaller screen size. Then we added achievements and monetisation, a whole bunch of help menus, and a great tutorial.

After a lot of fiddling around we ended up with a really good end product.

JH: The moment I played my first game with tilt controls and enjoyed it. It's always the same with these kind of games, it's all about that magic moment during play when you just want to win. Once you start to play rather than to analyse your product then you know it's well on the road to being special.

To me the innovation of the tilt controls is the most important design aspect of the game; it is the only truly nextgen part of the game.

JH: The tilt controls and the slick presentation. We worked really hard to get the game looking that smooth, especially in the menus.

RK: Personally I am happiest with the gameplay, which is - of course - the core of any game. Slick presentation is no less important and I think we did as good a job with this as we did with the gameplay. Oh, and I love the soundtrack!

RK: I must admit, that I wasn't surprised by the feedback we got - we all knew that we did a great job with this game.

We got thousands of App Store reviews giving us 4.5 stars in average in all territories. We got great critical acclaim and a number of 90 percent reviews from major sites from all continents, which is really amazing!