Okay, so today I wanted to mess around with creating some, shall we say, “vertically challenged” soccer players. You know, make some short professional soccer players and see what happens. Here’s how it went down:
Figuring Out the Tools
First, I needed to figure out how to actually do this. I’m not a game developer, so I couldn’t just pop open some fancy engine and start tweaking models. I needed something simpler. My initial thought was to find a soccer game with a character creator, hoping I could just slide the height setting all the way down. Something like FIFA or eFootball, maybe?
I already owned a copy of a FIFA game I bought a few years ago. So I jumped that one.
Experimenting
I booted up the game and immediately looked for a character creation mode. I found a simple one.
- The Slider Struggle: Surprisingly, the height slider didn’t go down as far as I’d hoped! I mean, these guys were short, but not comically short. I wanted to see tiny players out there, but this was more like “slightly below average” height.
- Position Matters?: I then started thinking, “Does the player position even affect the height options?” Like, maybe goalkeepers had a different range than strikers. So, I spent a bit of time creating players in different positions, comparing the minimum heights. Nope, seemed pretty consistent across the board.
- Gameplay Time!: Even though they weren’t as short as I envisioned, I figured I’d play a few matches with my newly created team of “short kings.” The first game was a friendly match, and it was still, so I played a few more games just for fun!
My Results
So, could I create unbelievably short soccer players? Not really, the game’s character creator had its limits. It seems like the developers wanted to keep things somewhat realistic, even in the customization options. The matches I played were kind of funny, seeing my slightly-shorter-than-average team going up against regular-sized opponents. They were noticeably smaller, but it wasn’t the extreme difference I was initially aiming for.
It was a fun little experiment, anyway! I might try some other sports games in the future to see if their character creators are any different. Maybe there’s a basketball game out there that lets me make super-tall players… that’s a thought for another day!
