I made a reference to my “main” side quest in my last post and I think I’m at a point where I’m comfortable enough to share what I’ve been working on for the past few months (years, to be honest).
Having played football manager games for the best part of the last 20 years, I got to a point where I felt I could improve on the current state of play by myself (even if I’d be the only one playing the game).
Football manager games generally fall into two main categories for me: one where you play by yourself in a game world filled with “AI-controlled” teams and manage the pace of the game (think Football manager 06-25) and another where the pace of the game is fixed because you play with other human managers (with some AI-managed teams) and you rely on the server moving the game dates - think Trophymanager, Hattrick, etc.
Typing this, I remember offering my software development services to TrophyManager about a decade ago (don’t quote me) and not getting a reply 😄.
Anyway…. A brief look into the official TrophyManager (my preferred game) forums would reveal a host of users calling for more developments and improvements to the game from the platform’s current users (some of them being paying customers like myself) and I thought, I can do that - afterall, I claim to be a senior software engineer.
So, in 2024, I started experimenting with a match-engine of my own making - trying out statistical models that would describe a game of football as faithfully as possible (sorry to American readers, Football is a game involving 22 humans playing a round leather ball with their feet!).
There’s a devlog describing the development process which would be published soon but for now, content yourselves with this. I finalised the first version of the match-engine and since a match-engine is useless without a game world, I decided to build a game world around it.
The journey has been interesting, to say the least, and I’ve learnt a lot along the way.
Since this wasn’t making any money, I decided to use as many free tools as I could while deferring any revenue questions until further down the line. That led me to booting up my raspberry pi 4 which I bought in 2021 and that’s been the server hosting the staging environment of TheDugout (as the game is called).
Given that I’m building this myself (as a one-man shop), I’ve had a lot of help from Cursor and the models available off the platform. I finally got the balls to ask someone else (my brother) to take a look at it one week ago and I’m open to wider interest and feedback.
The game is free to play at the moment and given my view of pay-to-win games (EA Sports), I’m still yet to make a decision on what monetisation looks like. The goal is to build a game where players truly enjoy themselves and don’t feel pressured to pay in order to get the best gaming experience.