Meet Joe—and let a player’s face tell you how they feel

The game has enough moving parts now that a player could reasonably ask what half the buttons do. I can reasonably ask that too, and I wrote them.

Enter Joe the Assistant. He gets a suited pixel portrait, a compact dock and explanations tied to what you’re actually looking at. The aim is to make help easy to reach without giving every screen a wall of instructions.

What changed since the injury and postseason work

• Joe has a place on screen. His dock and anchored speech bubble keep explanations close to their subject.
• Help can take you somewhere useful. Inbox and menu links lead to real destinations; a spotlight can identify the relevant control.
• Guidance remembers what you’ve seen. Once-per-function explanations avoid repeating the introduction indefinitely.
• Required decisions get priority. Drafts can stay quiet, while a blocking review still receives the attention it needs.
• Opponent strategy history is available. Advice can use recorded habits and suggest a counter without revealing an upcoming selection.
• Other clubs can send trade offers. Saved proposals have expiry and an accept-or-decline review, rather than relying on me to initiate every conversation.
• Players have contract expressions. Smiles, neutral mouths and frowns reflect their satisfaction with an agreement.
• Trophies and achievements have pixel emblems. Earned, locked and unavailable entries receive distinct treatments.
• Bug reports carry useful context. Build and screen information can accompany a user-controlled report, with clipboard and local-text fallbacks.

The roster has opinions

The expression belongs to the contract system. A player can be pleased, unconvinced or thoroughly unimpressed with the offer in front of him. That’s useful information to see on his face, alongside the actual figures.

At the moment, a player smiles when contract satisfaction is above seventy percent. I need to try a range of offers and see whether the expressions are giving me useful information. I’m fairly sure the roster will find plenty of opportunities to frown at me.

The expression doesn’t change his ability. I need to keep that separate, otherwise drawing a happier mouth would become the most effective training program in football.

Help needs manners

Joe shouldn’t announce a save every time one happens or interrupt a draft to tell me what I already know. Explicit Help remains available, but routine messages can wait behind something important.

He also isn’t there to expose an opponent’s next move. Historical tendencies give me something to consider; certainty about the future would remove the decision entirely.

That’s the first version of Joe’s job: explain, point and get out of the way. Next the players get backgrounds, and the league gets a better way to tell me what’s happening.