Hello friends! The official Steam Store page is up now for Rox Solid Pro Football. This has been a long time in the making, from original prototypes in NodeJS in 2020, to an Electron version in 2024, to this final rendition in Godot. When I first had this idea 6 years ago, there was very little in the way of a Football Manager style deep sim for American football. Now, at least half a dozen have released in the last few months. What an incredibly awful time to try and release this. Anyway, onto the recipe.
Demo Availability
The goal is to release the demo in October, the earlier the better. The game is technically feature-complete, and can effectively play itself into perpetuity. Unfortunately, not quite where I want it to be yet as far as polish goes, and it was a conscious effort to not dump this into some kind of Early Access concept half-finished. But soon!
Release Roadmap
Polishing things has been slow going, as verbiage gets rewritten, and different things get surfaced in the UI, and I still have to finish creating the rest of the plays that are going to ship with the game. I decided to make 56 offensive formations, that each need their own plays. I am an idiot.
The original goal was to release around mid-November, but whoopsie doodle, that's when GTA 6 releases, so we're not doing that. Current target windows are the last week of October or the first week of November, but that feels ambitious. If it slips, it'll be early December, so it can be buried in all of the other stuff releasing right before Christmas, something something self-fulfilling prophecy. It will definitely be released in 2026, though.
Developments
Steam Achievements and Workshop support are currently in progress, while going through and doing testing/polishing passes. I've got 30 achievements laid out, but still have to write their triggers, and figure out what I'm doing for the icons. As a Bucs fan, I am most proud of: "In Favor of It", with description "Your team execution was so poor that they went winless for an entire regular season", as a callback to the quote attributed to John McKay (when asked about his team's execution after they went winless for the season, he said he was in favor of it).
Systems are in place to (hopefully) slot Workshop support into the Playbook and Schemes. This being a Pro Football Sim, hopefully we gather enough of a following (or I just do it myself) that real-life rosters can be a thing, and I'd like to support that as well via the Workshop, but that may not make it for release.
Steam Input is part of the polish pass, making sure that the whole game can be played comfortably with a controller. Feels like we're about 60% of the way there, on that front, but every day I find a new menu that doesn't work.
I feel pretty good about the balance tuning, we get a handful of QB's throwing for 4,000 yards a year, and the occasional running back getting to about 2,000 yards rushing. It was a specific decision to allow run-heavy teams to actually exist in this, so I'm not currently planning to work that back, but need to run more seasons further into the future to see if it becomes a problem.
I spent most of September trying to improve the simulation performance of the game. At the start of the month, it was taking ~35 minutes to run a full season all the way through on a 10 year old laptop with an i5 processor, now it takes about 15 minutes. The game is primarily CPU-bound, so a better processor returns better results. My 8 year old desktop with a Ryzen processor does the same work in about 9 minutes, so I feel pretty good about the results.
I added audio to the game! I tried finding some free-use calm/ambient menu music, but didn't feel anything really fit the football vibe. So right now it's about 2 hours of heavy metal music pulled from the Free Music Archive. When all else fails, go the Doom route with the music selection for your spreadsheet simulator.