So now I play my new football manager type game. I enjoy it. I have the basis of what I want to be there. I get excited about what is happening. I make changes and try to do better. I know how it works but that doesn’t make it easier for me. Only 70% of [...]
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Not easy to describe this. But it was important. Important to making it work, to making it succeed. I decided the setting, the football league, 4 divisions, plus a knockout cup, the FA Cup. I decided on what attributes your players would have. I decided what you could control. Then I pieced together the game [...]
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30 years ago, the ZX81 game was doing well, the TRS80 Football Manager not so much. Then Sinclair came out with the Spectrum. So, I spent a busy couple of months enhancing the game. And one of the things I decided to do was add goal mouth action. So I got busy designing animated footballers [...]
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So what was it that made the original Football Manager catch on so well, and what can I do now? Well since I wrote it, I know a lot about what made the original tick. I know I made it very playable, very enjoyable, and it had a pace that kept people playing it. I [...]
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So I launched it on to the market in January 1982. But before that of course, I wrote it. I bought a Video Genie to write it on. The Video Genie was a Tandy TRS80 clone. It was cheaper, but still expensive for me at the time. But, I believed that I would be successful [...]
Filed under: Addictive Games, Football Manager, Games Design, Kevin Toms, Software Development and Delivery, Software development tools, The 80s | Leave a Comment »
It’s worth putting that headline in caps. It was January 1982 that the first advert for Football Manager (my original game) appeared on the newstands in Computer and Video Games magazine. 30 years on, that foundation game has grown into a genre of computer games. My original game was very playable, and very popular, spending [...]
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57.62% complete. – That is what I wrote earlier on Facebook. I have been involved in many projects, with many estimations. But they are mostly flawed with software development. They try to make developing software like building a bridge, something that is done with fixed materials, specifications etc. But, often software is changed mid project, [...]
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It was interesting asking people what they wanted or needed in a Football Manager game. Everyone has different preferences and I have my own. In fact, a key part of putting the game together is filtering. I have plenty of ideas of what I want to do, and in the past I have generated a [...]
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Craig asked me a question on my Facebook page. It was a question about the follow up, and building up expectations, referring to Jon Romero. Well I replied on Facebook but he raised a very good point. This game I am writing, is in a way a follow up to Football Manager, the original Football [...]
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You know, the little stick men running around in the original Football Manager on the Spectrum. Sometimes people ask if the animation was a fixed set, or even believe it was. Well no, it wasn’t, there was an infinite number of possibilities of what could happen and the individual players were making decisions moment by [...]
Filed under: Addictive Games, Football Manager, Games Design, Kevin Toms, Software Development and Delivery, The 80s | 1 Comment »
