TheDugout has a lot of features “borrowed” from games I’ve enjoyed in the past. This borrowing has been done in the sense that you’d borrow a tractor from a neighbouring farmer and replace a faulty brake disc or a bad seat.
For instance, while TrophyManager allows you to see a players full attributes the moment you click on the player, and FootballManager limits what you can see based on the reach of your “scouting network”, TheDugout requires you to actually scout the player first and shows you estimates of the player’s ability based on the quality and ability of the scout you commissioned to generate a report on the player. The player exists, you know about them but you need to dispatch a scout to discover how good they are. Your understanding of how good they are is dependent on the quality of the scout you send.
And that’s just one thing.
There are detailed explanations of how the match engine works and how various player attributes affect the outcomes of matches (coupled with various tactical settings).
I don’t have any 3D projections of matches but the building blocks exist to build a 3d replay of matches as they’re summed because matches are simmed minute-to-minute (like in FootballManager)
Again, the games I played served as inspirations and I merely wanted to improve upon them.
FootballManager offers a gameplay where AI teams can sell players between each other and also sign and fire managers while TrophyManager only offered that functionality to Human managers, TheDugout provides a hybrid that allows you to bid on players in AI controlled teams and those teams decide on your offer based on their needs, their desire to be competitive and financial situation.
I’d end this post here but I’ll add more over the coming days to detail the architectural decisions I made.