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 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 »
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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I have worked in many programming languages on many computers large and small. Some good, some bad. So I have experienced plenty. Well Apple are winning with great product design right now but they are doing a great job with another product- the tools they provide to create iOS software. They are excellent and helpful. [...]
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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 »
When I was in New Zealand I met developers who were writing for the iPhone. Some produced good games, yet despite that were disappointed when the game did not succeed. The impression some had was that putting the game on the App Store was putting the game on the market. It isn’t, it’s more like [...]
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Well the technical term is debugging, but the effect of this one was lousy. It was one of the bugs that doesn’t just happen. It happens as a side effect of other side effects! Painful to track. Spent the afternoon on it. And all I got for several hours of effort is a debugging dialogue [...]
Filed under: Football Manager, iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, Software Development and Delivery | 3 Comments »
I got asked a really good question on my facebook page about when is this game going to be out? As a software developer of several decades, I loved this question. I even remember many years ago developing software for Windows getting together with other developers and brainstorming on why software is delayed, unlike projects [...]
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I have just completed a training course. One that interested me on Software Architecture. I’m an old dog now, but I can still, and often do, learn new tricks. Software Development as a career has one distinct characteristic that many professions do not have, especially to such a large degree. – The technology we use [...]
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