Creative Director of Ukrainian studio Creoteam Andriy Kostyushko shared details of the development of Football, Tactics & Glory and talked about the sources of inspiration and why the developers do not plan to transfer successful mechanics to other sports.
Creative Director of Ukrainian studio Creoteam Andriy Kostyushko shared details of the development of Football, Tactics & Glory and talked about the sources of inspiration and why the developers do not plan to transfer successful mechanics to other sports.
The developer spoke about this in an interview with the Mezha publication, dedicated to the history of the game’s creation and the team’s game design decisions.
According to Andriy Kostyushko, the idea for the project was born from his own disappointment with the classic football managers of the late 1990s. In such games, he was annoyed by the abundance of hidden player characteristics and the unpredictability of matches, which often forced users to look for «winning» tactical schemes on Internet forums instead of actually managing a team. He wanted to create a simulator where the player acts as an intelligent coach, analyzing the weaknesses and strengths of the opponent and planning every move.
«Since childhood, I liked it when commentators said something like, 'The coach guessed right with the substitution' or 'The coach managed to pick up the key to the opponent.' I wanted to feel like the kind of coach who clearly understood that he didn’t 'guess' with the substitution, but planned it. The kind who really 'picked up the key' to the opponent,» Kosciuszko explained.
The solution to this problem came from an unexpected source — the Japanese role-playing game Persona 3 for the PSP portable console, which the developer reviewed and began analyzing its game design.
«At that moment, I had an epiphany — I realized that there was a good idea in the combat system of this game,» recalls Andriy Kostyushko. He realized that the mechanics of the confrontation of the elements and the weaknesses of the characters in an RPG could be transferred to the football field, where even a weaker team could defeat a stronger one thanks to the right tactics.
Thus was born the concept that the developer initially recorded in a regular notebook: a football manager as a dungeon crawler with a small number of understandable characteristics, where matches are played in turn-based mode, and the trophies obtained act as game loot.
The project started during a difficult period for Creoteam, when the studio was actually falling apart. Andriy proposed the idea to his colleagues Anton and Sergey, who decided to stay in the team. Having a ready-made technical engine and animation tools, the developers began experimenting with the mechanics of the field. After a long search for the optimal format and scale of the field, in December 2011 the team created the first working prototype.
The developers divide the project’s life cycle into two key stages. The first stage lasted from December 2011 to the fall of 2013. At that time, the game was developed as a mobile free-to-play project called Soccer Tactics. The team failed to find funding to create a full-fledged classic football manager, but the developers signed an agreement with a publisher to release the game on iOS. At this stage, six specialists worked on the game.
The game received a new lease of life in early 2015, marking the start of a second phase of development. The studio was able to regain the rights to Soccer Tactics. Around the same time, Valve launched the Greenlight system on Steam, which allowed indie developers to publish games without the intervention of publishers.
«I realized that this was our chance to make the football manager I had dreamed of,» says Andriy Kostyushko. The team applied for Greenlight, and within a month the popular foreign publication Rock Paper Shotgun wrote about the Ukrainian game. Thanks to this, the project quickly gathered the necessary votes from the Steam community, and in June 2015 the game was released into Early Access.
Despite initial successes, the developers quickly faced harsh market realities.
«Mixing turn-based mechanics with a sports game scares off both fans of turn-based games and fans of sports games. So it’s very difficult to attract attention to such a project. And if a well-made turn-based game about football doesn’t automatically become popular, then a poorly made game about basketball or hockey won’t become any more popular,» says Andriy Kostyushko.
According to him, that’s why Creoteam has abandoned plans to scale these mechanics to hockey or basketball for now. The development of Football, Tactics & Glory required a deep understanding of the global football economy and match dynamics, and transferring so many nuances to other sports is too difficult for a small team.
In 2024, sales of Football, Tactics & Glory crossed the 100,000-copy mark. According to Kosciuszko, this result is still not enough to feel «unconditionally successful» or to work on a large scale — there is not enough money to expand the staff or pay the dream salaries.
However, this commercial indicator allowed the team to become self-sufficient and repay all debts accumulated since 2011, when the developers decided to invest their own funds in the project. Now Creoteam can live and work autonomously, without relying on publishers and third-party investments, and expects to achieve the desired financial result over time. The studio is currently working on the second part of Football, Tactics & Glory, the release of which is scheduled for 2027.
Recall that Andriy Kostyushko, together with his 13-year-old son Askold, created the game Threads of War, which was released on Steam in August 2025. The game combines the dynamics of the iconic Battle City from the NES era and modern roguelite mechanics, and the visual style is made in the form of traditional Ukrainian cross-stitch embroidery. Previously, dev.ua spoke with the developers about organizing the joint work of father and son, creating a unique soundtrack, and integrating Japanese localization into the release.
