The opponent now takes its own throw-ins, goal kicks and corners

Set pieces are where football games quietly give up. Ours doesn't anymore — the whole restart cycle plays itself, on both sides.

Every restart used to be a dead moment for the AI: the ball would sit there, then get nudged into play by invisible hands. Now the opposition plays them properly.

Throw-ins: two or three players check to the ball, breaking to short, open angles. The thrower picks the genuinely open man — every team-mate is scored on space, passing lane and distance the instant before release — then the ball goes to his hand, he winds up, and throws.

Goal kicks: two centre-backs split to the edges of the six-yard box, and the keeper plays out from the back to whoever's free — or boots it up to the striker at halfway if he fancies it. Your team is walled out of the box until he strikes it, exactly as Law 13 says.

Corners: a driven cross to the danger zone, six attackers crashing near-post, spot and far-post — and three staying home for the counter, because you don't send everyone up.

The best bug: the thrower kept throwing to himself. A ball in flight has no owner, so every AI fell back to "loose ball — closest man presses it." The thrower was closest. The receiver, seeing he wasn't closest, politely jogged away. Fixed by telling the team that a ball we've just played still belongs to us.

Eleven a side

I didn't write AI for 22 players. I wrote it for two.

Twenty-two players each deciding for themselves gives you under-8s football: everyone chases the ball, nobody holds a shape, because nobody is thinking about the team.

So I stopped writing player AI and wrote a Team Brain — one per side. It thinks ten times a second and hands every player a target. Players don't decide where to be; they read. What it actually does is move a block: it slides up and down the pitch with the ball, shifts to the ball's side, squeezes tight when you lose possession and spreads when you win it. That's just… football.

And here's the part I love: twenty-two players scanning each other every frame is a slideshow. One brain per team isn't. Team shape and performance turned out to be the same problem — and the same fix.

The pitch got the same treatment. Twenty-two hardcoded numbers became one config, so the code that paints the eighteen-yard box and the code that enforces it are now guaranteed to be the same box.

Bug of the week: the opposition stopped attacking and started running at their own goal. Each player carried a hand-typed "goal to attack" coordinate — and I'd resized the pitch. Now it's derived from the pitch and your shirt colour. It can't go stale, and it can't be typo'd.

Corners, and the full set-piece cycle

Throw-in, goal kick, corner. The match can now restart itself from anywhere the ball goes out.

Corner kicks landed this week — an aimed ground ball on one button, a lofted cross on another, both charged, both with a proper run-up that strikes the ball on the exact animation frame rather than teleporting it.

That completes the cycle. Every way the ball can leave the pitch now has a real, playable restart with its own camera, aim and animation. It sounds unglamorous until you play a match without it and the game just… stops.

Real bodies, real kits

The kit colour isn't something I picked. It's pulled straight from the club's record in the database.

Change the club, the shirts change. Team colour from the club, opponent in theirs, and the goalkeeper in something that clashes with both — which isn't my preference, it's Law 4 of the actual laws of the game.

Getting there was funnier than it should have been. My first attempt put the kit on the mannequin: his chest punched straight through the shirt, like a robot in pyjamas. The fix was a realisation, not a hack — the character system deletes the body geometry that sits under clothing. The arms, the legs and the outfit are made for each other. I was dressing the wrong body.

Zero per-player setup: spawn a footballer, tag him with a team, and he turns up in the right shirt. That's the whole point of building data-first — the game gets more real without me touching it.

Teaching the AI to actually pass

Every team-mate gets an Expected Success % — then the AI picks like a footballer, not a dice roll.

The passing brain scores every option on four things: how far it is (there's an ideal range — hopeful punts and toe-pokes both score badly), whether the lane is genuinely open (measured geometrically, not guessed), how much space the receiver has, and how much the ball actually progresses up the pitch.

Then the off-ball players got the same treatment in reverse: instead of scoring who to pass to, they score where to stand — open space, a clear lane from the carrier, spread from team-mates. Passing triangles emerged on their own. I didn't write "make a triangle" anywhere.

My favourite fix in the whole project came from this. The players kept slowly bunching together over a match, and I could not see why — until I realised that while a pass is in the air, the ball has no owner. Every team-mate dropped into "loose ball — closest man presses it," and the whole team converged. On every single pass. Possession, it turns out, includes the ball travelling between two of your players.