Unfortunately we have no exciting Christmas surprises for you this year; but the fact that the project is still moving forward, with a bigger development team than about a year ago when this project was first announced, hopefully makes most of you happy.
I wanna start by announcing the fact that we have decided to change the GUI to a WPF based one. This allows us to more easily create customized and non-application looking GUIs. In order to give you something for Christmas I will be uploading a screenshot of the new player profile using WPF on the 24th or 25th. While still a work in progress, it will give you a good idea of the design we are currently looking to use.
Now, as I hinted at the forum earlier this month I am gonna create a simulation environment. This environment will be a side-project which will later be merged with the "real" project. The implementation phase will be devided into several sub-phases starting fairly simple and finally hopefully be advanced enough to be part of the first playable version of the game. This part of the game I expect to be a never ending part of the development since it will be extremely hard to have implemented realistically. But if I was afraid of a challenge I never would have started the project in the first place.
This is how the simulator will work: It will start by generating a player of 14-15 years of age; attributes sush as estimated peak and atrophy can be manually assigned. Ahead of every simulation step the ability to either manually or randomly assign an injury and/or practice performance will exist. This will allow one to easily force a worst case/best case scenario or a more "average" one. Basically the appearance of all stimuli will be selectable manually if desired. The simulation will end when the player retires and graphs will be available in order to analyze the player's career curve.
While a lot of stimuli will be simplified from the beginning I intend to implement the practice system completely in the first phase.
Here is the plan for my simulation environment:
Phase 1:
Features:
- Monthly simulation steps
Set an individual practice schedule
Display attributes and basic info
- Injuries
Practice performance
Features:
- Adjustable simulation steps (daily/weekly/monthly)
Attribute history graphs
- Game performance
+ more, a lot of input could affect a player's career curve. I will write this down in more detail once I am in phase 2.
Phase 3: (TBD)
...
A goal of mine is to release a public version of the simulation environment for you to play around with; I believe that is the best way to receive feedback rather than waiting until the first playable version of the game is released. This is such a big part of the game so the sooner I get feedback the better.
So that is what I will be doing the rest of the year and starting next year. Updates on how Jake and Ricardo are doing will be made public once they tell me.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year everyone!