Dev Blog #1: Playing God with Semicolons

About a year ago, I made a wildly ambitious decision: I was going to pick programming back up and build a football management game.

Now, I actually have a Computer Science background, but I hadn’t written a single line of code in over twenty years. As it turns out, tech moves fast. My degree from the turn of the millennium in a completely different field was about as useful as trying to shove a floppy disk into an iPad. I knew the absolute basics, but I was incredibly rusty, and the gap between knowing how a loop works and building a functioning sports simulator is roughly the size of a football stadium.

Enter the “Engine” (Or: Me Staring at a Blank Screen)

I opened up VS Code and started working on what I grandiosely named the Player Creation Engine. In reality, it was just a blank script and me trying to remember where the semicolons went.

I figured a football team needs players, so that was the logical place to start: names, positions, backstory and ratings. How hard could it be?

Extremely hard, apparently. I completely underestimated how difficult it is to play God with spreadsheet data. Sure, typing in a name and giving a guy a “99 Speed” rating is easy. Deciding what that number actually does in the simulation is a whole different existential crisis.

I wanted drafting to matter. If a running back has elite catching hands, he needs to feel completely different in the playbook than a 230-pound power back who just plows through people like a bowling ball. If every auto-generated rookie ended up with a virtually identical, lukewarm profile, the game would be a boring chore.

The Deeply Unglamorous Reality

Before I could even get to the fun football logic, I spent weeks trapped in a loop solving the most ordinary, maddening problems:

• Identity Crises: Making sure the game tracked this specific John Smith and didn’t accidentally fuse his soul with a different John Smith.
• Data Amnesia: Figuring out how to update a player’s profile (like an injury status) without accidentally wiping out the rest of their historical stats.
• The “Build-Break-Cry” Loop: Write what I thought was an elegant approach, run it, watch it blow up because of a blind spot I missed, and go back to the drawing board.

I was trying to learn project architecture while simultaneously relearning how to write clean code. Muscle memory is a funny thing—some syntax rules came back instantly, while other basic concepts made me feel like an absolute imposter. Having a programming background doesn’t mean you automatically know how to organize a massive, multi-layered data project by yourself.

I could explain why I liked a bourbon in considerably more detail than I could explain how I planned to build this game. An impressive set of priorities.

What I had by this first update

• A start on the Player Creation Engine: names, positions, backstory and ratings gathered into player profiles.
• Identity work: figuring out how to keep two players with the same name separate.
• Profile-update work: changing information without throwing away the rest of a player’s history.
• A clearer next problem: the ratings needed to mean something in football before the simulation could use them.

That was the starting point. I was still working through the data in VS Code; the card below is a look ahead to the recent version.

From numbers to a player

A look at how that player data appears in the prototype.

Creating a playerEarlier prototype

A player with a profileAndroid · Build 286 · Sep 30, 2026

Where It Stands Today

Which brings us to Bijan Rollinson.

The card below uses player data exported from the game, along with its pixel portrait.

IDLEBALL · FOOTBALL

PLAYER PROFILE RB · #12

Bijan
Rollinson

Running back · 5′ 10″ · 197 lb

Hometown

Walnut Falls, Wisconsin

College

Whisper Heights Technical College

Seeing it look like a real video game is honestly wild to me, considering not long ago, my “game” was just a sad text file of raw numbers inside VS Code.

Getting those numbers to behave like actual athletes in a simulated game was the next massive hill to climb. First, though, I needed players who didn’t all feel like the same guy. That’s where the next update picks up.