What if you combined through balls and passing into one button rather than two? Still want to be able to pass to players further away? Hold in L1. How will you know the path the team-mate will be running in? How do you currently know the path your team-mate is running? Whats the point? 1.It frees up one of the coveted right-thumb buttons (possibly for knocking ahead into your own path, or something more exciting). 2.It requires the player to judge the strength of the through ball, rewarding more spacially aware players (who are better footballers). 3.It allows the game to recognise the class of the world's best passers (scholes, carrick etc <ignore bias />). Any thoughts?

I don't play a lot of football games, however, using button pressure on an either down or up button is fraught with difficulties even if you use only 3 settings. Any more than that an the amount of power would be almost complete luck.

Users can not sufficiently accurately guage six levels of pressure on face buttons. My recommendation is to use tap, double-tap and hold to triple functionality on the same button, but beyond that look elsewhere.

I'm toying with giving a basketball game another shot, and I want to make a game where you play the team and are rewarded for team ball, as opposed to individualistic exploits. Each of the four face buttons (assuming Xbox/DualShock-type gamepad) would pass to a specific teammate. Tap would give a direct pass - hand-off, chest or bounce depending on context. Double tap would be a lead pass (to hit the cutting player in rhythm). Hold would fake the pass.

This frees the right analog stick for shot stick usage (it's a brilliant idea), the d-pad for play calling, and the triggers, bumpers and shoulder buttons for changing playsets, give-and-gos and other modifiers.

Good luck with your football concepts.

I love playing any sports games. This is a good concept in the fact that it rewards better thinking rather than button mashing but like others have said it might be too hard to judge how hard you are pressing the button. If you could somehow combine the overall concept with a more friendly control system I think it would work very well.

By the way Oluseyi I am currently working on a basketball game with a similar system except I am using the right stick for ball handling and the triggers for shooting. Plays are too complicated for me... If I make anysort of progress on the game I'll elaborate but that is unlikely. Well sorry for my rambling and good luck with your football idea.

Consider making the throw button a "shift" button. The user holds down the throw button (on a controller, it could be a shoulder-pad button), and can then press any one of the others to trigger the type of throw. On a standard Playstation 1 controller, for example, you could have up to 7 types of throws.

An alternative would be to just press the throw button, release, then press any button on the pad to select the type of throw - even the throw button itself. That would be up to 8 types of throws on a PS1 pad.

This type of thing would also let you do something neat through animation, like showing the character getting ready to launch the ball on the first press, then launching it instantly on the second press.

*cough* soccer...

Heh.. Well, just pretend I said kick instead of throw. The shifting and pre-tapping would still work pretty well. The character can still move around with the analog or d-pad in between the first and second presses. They just wouldn't be able to perform other button actions. That shouldn't be much of a problem. The animation gimmick might be out, though.

Glad it was useful!