I’ve been thinking about this game for years. NFL Street came out in 2004 — I was 8 years old — and nothing has come close since. At some point you stop waiting for someone else to build it.
So I opened Godot 4, created a new project, and started.
Why Godot
I looked at Unity, Unreal, and Godot. Unity’s pricing drama in 2023 made me nervous about building a commercial product on it. Unreal is overkill for a 2D pixel-art game. Godot is open source, lightweight, and fast to iterate in. For a solo dev building a 2D game, it was the obvious choice.
The field
The prototype field is a pixel-art tileset rendered top-down at a roughly 30-degree isometric angle — similar to Retro Bowl’s perspective but with more of a street vibe. Yard lines, end zones, grass texture, and sideline buffers that give enough room for outside routes and edge runs without losing the compact street-ball feel.
Getting the field width right was actually one of the trickier early decisions. Too narrow and 7v7 formations feel cramped. Too wide and the players look like ants.
First pass, first catch
The first time a football spiraled across the screen and landed in a receiver’s hands — that’s when it stopped being a tech demo and started feeling like a football game. The ball arcs through the air with spin, and when a player enters the catch zone, it snaps to them. Simple, but it felt right.
Movement and camera
Player movement is 8-directional with smooth acceleration and deceleration — snappy but not twitchy. Nothing flashy for a prototype, but getting movement to feel good early was important. If running around the field doesn’t feel right, nothing else matters.
I rewrote the camera early because the first version tracked the player, which felt wrong. Football cameras track the ball, not the quarterback. The camera now follows the football with screen shake on tackles. On deep throws, it zooms out to give you a broadcast-style wide shot of the ball in the air, and on shorter plays it looks ahead upfield so you can see what’s coming. It’s a small change, but it makes the game feel 10x more polished.
Main menu
The main menu has a title with a looping pulse animation, four mode buttons (Quick Play, Career Mode, Online Play, Training), and a bottom bar with Credits, Settings, Store, and Quit. Online Play is disabled with a “COMING SOON” label.
Where v0.1 lands
At the end of this sprint, I have a playable sandbox. A player running around a pixel-art field, throwing a football that arcs through the air, catching it, with a camera that tracks the action like a broadcast. No rules, no scoring, no AI — just the raw foundation.
It doesn’t sound like much on paper. But every football game starts here.
Next up: turning the sandbox into a real game.
— Jesse