I pitched my Football Manager re-write at the Montreal International Games Summit . What does this mean? It means the game is in playable form! Of course it is unfinished and there is a lot to do but this is a step forward.
Currently the match action is Electron/ZX81 style, but it works!
Here’s a pic of me pitching:
So it is three years now
I’ve been writing this game
A big part of my life
And it won’t be in vain
It’s nearly complete now
Just a bit more work
It will be a battle
But I’ll get there yet
So will it be fun?
As good as before
Another FM
And never a bore
Well nobody knows this
Except maybe me
And I am so pushy
About what it should be
And it’s me that I’m pushing
To get it all right
And the time that is needed
Is just out of sight
So back to the grindstone
And maybe the lathe
To cut a good game out
And the project to save!
Still working out how much is left to complete this game. 20 tasks left.
I was thinking of the game name this morning. I originally called my game Football Manager. Funnily enough, a certain other company is now using that name for their football game. So I was wondering what you all think I should call the new Football Manager game from me. I have asked this before but I would like to have some fun with this.
So, what would you call it?
.. after a few week’s break. Time was needed to just sit back and think for a while. Now it time to apply all those thoughts and move everything forward. Piece by piece, there is a plan there, now to bring it all into action, and a game onto the market!!
Well not really, I am doing another revamp of the error handling. Sometimes I get brilliant ideas, well that’s what I think they are at the time lol! With the error handling I created a sophisticated flexible system that will elegantly handle errors in the code and produce valuable information. (<–Warning, smelly cow droppings alert!)
I thought I had produced simplicity and elegance:
But in fact I had produced this:
.. And I have been re-engineering it back to simplicity regularly since!
I demonstrated the game to a couple of friends, let them try it. Found a new couple of bugs as expected. It was also a chance to see if someone can work out what to do without help. It needs more work on that, but that was expected too. It’s good to at least having it functioning well enough to demonstrate the game and its structure by someone trying to play it!
Spectrum 30 was an opportunity for me. An opportunity to meet people who played my games and to talk about the process of creating them, marketing them and doing things the way I did. I got asked lots of great, searching questions, and fun ones, like where the beard is now! 🙂
So I finally did what I wanted to do. Part of this game has now been developed in the Grand Place in Brussels. In a coffee shop overlooking the square and those great buildings! What I was working on was some of the animation pieces that I decide to add just recently. So it’s still a case of just keep working working I know what I’m aiming for and I know when I get there.
This game has taken some stamina!
The managers have got smarter. Not sure about real life, has Arsene Wenger made the right choice to try another season for example? But in the game they have. I have been adding to that. I also know what the piece is that is missing, what it is that I need to change. So there is more to do but the game gets qualities that are faster, higher, stronger 😉
Kevin Toms Blog 