Tiny Derby, a soccer game with the fun of Subuteo
Aim, charge, release. Football reduced to one gesture, then grown into a full game — a roster, fifteen power-ups, a squad to train and a league — and now close to release.
- Role
- Design, art direction, engineering
- When
- Aug 2026 · close to release
- Where
- iOS · Android · Unity
Challenge
Reduce football to a single gesture, then find out whether it can carry a whole game — a career, a squad and fifteen ways to bend the rules — without losing what made the first flick fun.
Approach
Lock the gesture first, design the screens before building them, let bots play thousands of matches to balance it, and write every decision down as it is taken.
Result
Close to release, on TestFlight at 2.5.8: a roster shaped in the Player Lab, fifteen power-ups, training that changes the physics, and a league of 128 original clubs.
What it is
The short version
Aim, charge, release. TinyDerby is football reduced to one gesture, and then built out into a full game around it: a roster of players you shape in the Player Lab — face, hair, kit, boots — fifteen power-ups, a squad you train, and Road to Glory, a league of 128 original clubs across 16 countries.
Training is not cosmetic. Five skills — attack, keeper, defence, fitness, accuracy — change the physics of every shot in the league, and going up a division takes both a top-two finish and a squad strong enough to hold the spot.
Process
How it was built
- 01
Lock the gesture first
Aim-and-charge was chosen and then defended against several better-sounding alternatives, each recorded with why it lost.
- 02
Design the screens before building them
Every screen was a board before it was code — the Player Lab, training, the league table, the power-up catalogue — so the game grew as a product rather than out of the prototype.
- 03
Let bots play it thousands of times
Balance came out of thousands of automated matches instead of out of taste, and every power-up is tested the way a thumb uses it — press, then release — before it ships.
- 04
Write the decision down when you make it
Dated, with its consequence and what it replaced. That is what makes a fast sprint reviewable instead of a blur.
Outcome
Where it landed
On TestFlight at 2.5.8 and close to release, with the roster, the Player Lab, fifteen power-ups, training, the Road to Glory league and a Fans leaderboard running on its own server.
The bug worth keeping from the first week: every match reported 0-0, because the app around the game restarted the round during the goal celebration and wiped the score it had just recorded.
Lesson
What it cost me to learn
A game can be right in the engine and wrong in the app around it. Everything stayed green the whole time the scoreline was a lie.