Real People Ruin Everything

I play tested this with 4 people a few days ago, and boy were they confused! In response to that, I simplified a bunch of things and I think the game is already playing better:

* Removed attacks. It's not super fun if people on defense can just hassle the person with the ball over and over again until the defender wins a skirmish and gets the ball. Plus, the constant mode switching makes it very hard to tell what's going on. I originally thought that this would be necessary in order to prevent people from holding onto the ball forever, but we also have the "ball explode" mechanic that works as a shot clock and is much more fun. When somebody tries to shoot or pass, defenders still get a chance to to steal the ball, so competitive slider-stopping remains in the game.

* If a player fails to defend a kick, they get exploded. This is an attempt to punish smothering defense a little bit. Ideally, the ball-carrier should be crowded periodically, but not all the time. This change gets defenders out of the way so the game flows better.

* The projected trajectory sprites are now black instead of white. These were very hard to see on a real Genesis/TV screen; I hope they look better now.

* When we transition to slider mode, we turn on shadow and hide all the not-participating player sprites so that it's more clear where the focus is supposed to be.

* Changing characters with the B button is now disabled if you're on the same team as another human.

In addition, there's a few things I've been working on that will potentially make the game more confusing, but I hope is worthwhile in the long-run.

* The speed stat ("F") is respected. Some characters now are faster than others. I expect other stats to make a difference in the next update.

* I went through several iterations of improving the goal hit box. It still doesn't quite work how I want it to; when I figure out how to actually model it I'll probably write another post.

* misc bugfixes and AI tweaks.