DEV BLOG / 08
One whole season. My own little moon landing.
The first successful season, and why reaching the end meant so much to me.
Game screenshots
After getting the prototype into Godot, I finally got through a full season.
That probably sounds like a fairly ordinary requirement for a football management game. It is. For me, it was like landing on the moon.
I’d spent so much time on players, ratings and individual games that reaching the end of a season felt enormous. I could finally talk about a season that had happened, instead of explaining how one was supposed to happen. A small distinction, unless you’re the guy who has been writing all the explanations.
What changed since the last post
- The game made it through a complete season. The work on individual matchups finally held together for a full run.
- The season had an ending. Getting games to run was only part of it; I needed to reach a finished season rather than keep producing another score.
- I had a full set of results to go back through. That gave me a much better way to judge what the simulation was doing over time.
- The next question became much bigger. Could I keep the same dynasty going year after year?
A game, and an ending
Later development captures of the match and season-end screens, from a separate save.
Successful didn’t mean finished
I wasn’t suddenly satisfied with every result or every screen. Finishing the season didn’t magically make the football perfect, and it certainly didn’t turn me into an experienced game developer. It did mean that a fairly important chunk of the game could get from its beginning to its end.
That was enough for me to be proud of it. I’d picked programming back up after more than twenty years, during a career change, and here was something I’d built actually doing the thing I’d been trying to make it do.
NASA probably has a more rigorous definition of a moon landing. Mine involved considerably less rocket fuel and a football season that finally ended. I was happy to take it.
Now do it again
One season gave me something concrete to build on. It also left a rather obvious question: what happened when I kept going?
Players change, new draft classes arrive, and the amount of history grows. I wanted a long career, so I needed to find out how the engine handled more than one good run.
Then there was next year
These captures show the next-season budget in that later save.
That led straight to the first completed 50-season dynasty. Apparently, after reaching the moon, my next sensible decision was to ask for fifty trips.