From Excel to the First Kick-Off

Nearly three years ago, One Touch wasn’t a mobile game. There was no app, no matchmaking, no animated stadium, no illustrated cards and certainly no community waiting to challenge each other from their phones. For almost an entire year, our football game essentially lived inside an Excel spreadsheet. It might not be the most spectacular origin story in video game history, but it tells you almost everything you need to know about the way we wanted to build One Touch. We had an idea, a ridiculous number of questions and one conviction that became more important as the project grew: before trying to make a beautiful game, we had to make a good one. So we tested, calculated, changed values, invented cards, removed rules we had been convinced were brilliant a week earlier and started again until we found that elusive formula every game designer searches for — something simple enough to understand quickly, deep enough to challenge you and, most importantly, fun enough to make you want another match.

Today, that Excel spreadsheet has become One Touch. In five days, on Monday, August 24 at 6 PM, another chapter begins as we open our private Pre-Alpha on iOS and Android. Calling this a launch would probably give the moment a meaning it doesn’t have yet, because One Touch isn’t finished and we have no intention of pretending otherwise. What happens on Monday is much more important to us: for the first time, the game will genuinely leave the hands of the people building it and enter the hands of the people we’re building it for. The first cards will be played, the first goals will be scored, the first strategies will emerge, some of our carefully balanced ideas will probably be destroyed within a few matches, and the first victories in the history of this Pre-Alpha will finally belong to the players.

Before Building the Video Game, We Had to Find the Game

When we started working on One Touch, we knew we wanted to imagine a new way of playing football, but we didn’t yet know exactly what that meant. We loved football games, competitive card games and TCGs. We loved deckbuilding, strategy and that particular feeling you get from a game when you slowly realise that a decision made now might completely change what happens several turns later. The challenge was easy to describe and considerably harder to solve: how could we take everything we loved about football and turn it into a competitive card game without simply putting football players on cards?

That question explains why we spent so much time away from traditional game development. For almost a year, we focused almost exclusively on gameplay rather than software development, because Excel was enough to answer the questions that actually mattered. Was a match fun? Could one decision genuinely change its outcome? Were there different ways to win? Did players have to think only about the card in front of them, or could they anticipate what might happen several decisions later? Most importantly, after losing a match, did you understand enough about what went wrong to want another chance? Looking at One Touch running on a phone today, that period can seem almost primitive, but it was probably one of the most important phases in the entire project. Before thinking about beautiful cards, animations or progression systems, we needed to know whether two people sitting opposite each other could simply enjoy playing the game.

Gradually, the pieces began to fit together. A game started to feel more like a football match. Time became a resource to manage, cards began creating meaningful choices, attack and defence found their rhythm, and deckbuilding stopped being about selecting the strongest individual cards and became a question of constructing a coherent football strategy. We had finally found the formula we had spent so long searching for: something accessible enough to understand, challenging enough to master and capable of creating that very particular feeling after a close defeat when you know that one different decision might have changed everything.

A Private Pre-Alpha Built With Players

Calling this a private Pre-Alpha might make it sound as though only a handful of carefully selected people are allowed inside. That isn’t really our philosophy. We simply want to begin with a community small and close enough for us to talk to players, watch how the game is being played, understand their feedback and continue improving One Touch alongside them. Access is therefore intentionally straightforward: join our Discord, complete a few simple community actions such as supporting and sharing the project, and you can become one of the first people to receive access to the Pre-Alpha.

Join Discord and Access the Private Pre-Alpha

This isn’t simply a convenient way to organise a test. It reflects the way we believe One Touch needs to be developed. After almost three years of making decisions internally, we know that some of the most important improvements from this point forward cannot come from the studio alone. They will come from the player who doesn’t understand a mechanic we thought was obvious, from someone who discovers a card combination we never considered, or from a match that feels frustrating for reasons we hadn’t experienced during hundreds of internal playtests. We want to talk directly to those players, understand what they experienced and be willing to question what we have built when their behaviour shows us that a better solution exists.

As a small independent game studio made in France, that proximity feels natural to us. We don’t want to disappear for years, build everything behind closed doors and eventually return with a finished product that players can either accept or reject. One Touch needs to evolve with the people playing it. Sometimes that will mean improving an idea. Sometimes it will mean explaining why a mechanic exists. Sometimes it will mean admitting that something we believed in simply doesn’t work and rebuilding it. That is what a Pre-Alpha should be: the moment when the convictions of game designers finally meet the reality of players.

What You’ll Actually Play on August 24

This first version already contains the heart of One Touch. Nearly 30 cards will be available across four nations, giving players their first opportunity to explore different approaches to football and different ways of constructing a deck. Deckbuilding is already part of the experience, allowing you to start shaping your own strategy, while a tutorial introduces the fundamental mechanics before you face another player. Everything surrounding the game isn’t there yet, but the essential part is: two players, two strategies and a football match in which every card can influence the balance of power until the final whistle.

More than the number of cards or features available, this is the feeling we want to test. One Touch approaches the football game from a different perspective. You don’t directly control a striker with a joystick, trigger the shot yourself or rely on a perfectly timed sequence of buttons to beat a defender. Instead, you build your squad, prepare a strategy, read your opponent and make decisions as the match evolves. A card can strengthen an attack, stabilise a defence or create an opportunity, while a decision that makes perfect sense at one moment can become the wrong choice only a few turns later. Football remains at the centre of the experience, but One Touch explores it through tactics, anticipation, deckbuilding and decision-making rather than direct control.

That is also why we want everyone to meet on Discord at 6 PM on Monday, August 24. At the scale of a private Pre-Alpha, pretending that matchmaking will instantly find an opponent twenty-four hours a day would make little sense. We would rather build something much more human. We’ll meet together for the opening session, play the first matches and then use a dedicated channel where anyone looking for a game can find another available player. You want a match, you ask for one. Someone answers. A few moments later, cards are on the pitch. For the first weeks of One Touch, we think that kind of proximity will be far more valuable than sitting silently in a matchmaking queue.

Be There for the First Kick-Off

No Shop. No Ranked. Not Yet.

When you open this private Pre-Alpha, several features you might expect from a mobile card game or TCG won’t be there. There is no shop yet, no complete system for collecting new cards, no ranked mode and none of the wider live content ecosystem that will eventually surround One Touch. Those features will have their moment, and some are already part of what we’re imagining for the future, but right now they don’t answer the question we care about most.

Is the game good enough to make you want to play again?

Before thinking about how players will expand their card collection, we want to know whether they enjoy playing with the cards already in their hands. Before building a competitive ranking system, we want to know whether winning makes you want to improve and whether losing makes you want to understand what you could have done differently. Before talking about a shop or monetisation, we want to see the reaction every game designer hopes for: finishing a match, thinking about the decisions you just made and immediately wanting another one.

In many ways, it is exactly the same philosophy that led us to spend almost a year working in Excel instead of immediately developing a beautiful mobile application. We could have started building everything surrounding the game much earlier. We chose to concentrate on what happens when two players face each other. Almost three years later, the priority hasn’t changed: gameplay first, everything else second.

Three Years to Reach the First Match

A lot has happened since those first spreadsheets. What began as a gameplay idea has gradually become a real football game, surrounded by a growing community and supported by people who believe in what we’re trying to build. Along the way, we’ve had the chance to convince partners, bring together talented people around the project and, more recently, welcome Nicolas Anelka into the One Touch adventure. For a small independent French studio, seeing someone who experienced football at the highest level believe enough in our vision to become part of it is an extraordinary milestone.

But no partner, no name and no presentation can replace what needs to happen next.

People need to play.

Only then will we really understand what we have built. When players we’ve never met begin creating their own decks, finding strategies we didn’t anticipate, telling us that a card is far too strong when we were convinced it was perfectly balanced, scoring goals in ways we never expected or simply challenging each other to an immediate rematch on Discord, One Touch will start becoming something different. It will no longer be only the football card game we imagined inside the studio. It will start becoming the game its players create with us.

On Monday, August 24 at 6 PM, we’ll meet on Discord for the opening of the private Pre-Alpha. We’ll play the first cards, score the first goals and discover the first strategies created by the community. There will be bugs, balancing problems, things we need to explain and probably a few surprises we’re completely unprepared for. We know that, and that’s exactly why we’re doing it.

We’ve spent almost three years building One Touch.

On August 24, we finally start building it with you.

Join Discord and Take Part in the One Touch Private Pre-Alpha

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