The fire test: how we made our ‘first’ video game

Startreming has been around for a while. The first time the made-up name was mentioned happened back in 2014, coming out of the mouth of a CEO’s friend. Along with Daniel Vasquez, Nicolas Manzanares started the journey of making a video game company. A year later, “Lowcoball” was launched on Steam Greenlight, getting approved a few months later.

It took 6 years to get the branding right.

The now-called LocoSoccer was born and so was Startreming, not yet called a company due to its informality (the founder and co-founder were 15 years old when the game was launched).

The original game when it just came out.

On March 30th, 2022, Startreming Games becomes an LLC and begins to pursue its goal of making a bold journey as a fully grown and experienced team. That was unimaginable eight years ago.

Announcing to the team that Startreming is now a company.

Back in 2022, Master Of Earth was the game in development. The team took a break from such a huge game to work on something smaller. With the World Cup around the corner and after a long 8 years, it was the right time to test the team (now with 7 employees) and work on LOCOSOCCER, the online multiplayer polished reboot the original game needed.

The task was more difficult than it seemed. The idea was to update the original LocoSoccer with the World Cup’s style. However, Nicolas realized the team was capable of pulling off a tight development with a deadline of 2 months if a key ingredient was unlocked: the multiplayer solution.

The game was created in just a month and a half. Cover art by Lucas Santiago Cosenza

The original LocoSoccer only featured single-player and local cooperative which was alright, but not great: it was impossible to play with friends online without a lot of latency. The task was to make the game feel smooth online, and play with as many friends as you wanted (with a limit of 10 in a single match).

And then the solution appeared: Fish Networking. Nicolas already fiddled around with the technology and it was quite similar to other solutions he has tackled, but the decision of using this technology with no experience at all (and with many of the team with no experience in multiplayer at all)

Nevertheless, Nicolas contacted the lead developer of Fish Net through Discord to ask for an enterprise solution that could enable the development team to make the game possible.

Sponsoring FirstGearGames makes development possible

The development process was intense, fun, and refreshing for the whole team. We shipped the game using our new in-house audio solution STMOD, an advanced wrapper for FMOD for Windows, Linux, and even Mac, for the first time. We tried new things, and we worked as a team non-stop.

Crowd sounds were recorded live in Argentinian stadiums.

Even making the trailer was a challenge itself (and also a no-brainer), since we pushed the boundaries to record a live-action video with post-production, get the licensing rights for a song, and everything in less than a week.

LOCOSOCCER was released on December 7th, 2022. It’s the first full-featured game by newborn Startreming Games, as a company and most importantly, as a team. It’s available on Steam for Windows, Mac & Linux.

An example of a match with multiple players.

What’s next for the team? You’ll hear from us soon. We’ll be exploring various game genres, technologies, and challenges. Stay tuned!