The players are starting to feel like people

The player engine can give me a league full of names and ratings, but I want to remember who these people are once I close the spreadsheet. This month I’ve been filling in some of the life around the football. Apparently getting the simulation to work was only the beginning....

Players now have hometowns, colleges, hobbies and some fairly questionable personal stories. Their backgrounds stay with them as their careers grow. Height and weight affect the portraits, older players start to look older, and retired players keep their final appearance. I’m putting the same attention into the clubs, with histories and rivalries that exist before a new coach turns up. There should be a reason to care about beating a particular team beyond moving up one place in the standings.

Joe is becoming the person who helps make sense of all this. He has a guided tour and help tied to the menus, and he can look through finished games when I ask about an opponent. That last part matters: he’s reading the record, not secretly looking at the other coach’s next move. The fuller conversation feature is on desktop; phones use the written help answers.

I’ve also been working on the decisions underneath the extra personality. An injury needs to show me who can cover the position. A player’s ability and potential need to explain two different things. The statistics need to help me pick a team, instead of giving me another long page of numbers to admire. I like a spreadsheet as much as the next engineer, but there does need to be a game in here somewhere.

There’s still plenty to sort out, especially how much help and information belongs on each screen. Next up is bringing these pieces into Godot and seeing how they hold together when I’m moving around the franchise. More software to learn. Of course there is.