As 2019 nears we have some exciting news to report about the future of AFC!
The current version of AFC will be updated for 2019 before the start of the new season, and possibly before the start of the new year. This will be a relatively small update, with new lists and an updated injury model to reduce the number of long-term injuries and increase the number of short-term injuries.
What's even more exciting is that the new AFC version is well on its way. This is a ground-up rewrite of the original Australian Football Coach, with an entirely new GUI, a rewritten match engine, and a completely different style of simulation.
The original AFC - the game up on the site now - was written to be very player-centric. The new version of the game has been designed to create a full and accurate simulation of the world of footy which you as a player will then drop into. Except for the fact the GUI's completely up to date, you probably won't notice much difference in terms of gameplay, but redesigning the game in this way has a number of added benefits:
- human players can coach multiple teams simultaneously. This feature may not ultimately be added, but the option exists to develop it, whereas it's impossible in the current version
- a full 365-day calendar
- player/coach skills/aging occurs dynamically during the season
- players have proper birthdays
- leagues now have a degree of autonomy from each other, making it easier to add/change/edit team compositions in game, or even run multiple national competitions alongside each other
- a women's league runs during the correct time of the calendar, and female names have been added to the game
- salary calculation has been updated and more accurately reflects reality
As a result, the new version's currently a simulation without any human input, and work on how the human player interacts with the game will start once the simulation's entirely finished, as opposed to the old version, which developed all of the human coaching elements first.
The game engine has also been updated and now runs faster, even though it now plays out in 1/10th of a second intervals instead of every second. The rewrite also allows things like disposal efficiency to be tracked easily, which the current disposal module incredibly isn't able to do.
While the new game's technically a ground-up rewrite, a lot of the old good code has been recycled, including the dynamic weather module, the stadiums module, the percentage module, and the finals module which allows for some extremely customisable end of season combinations.
A number of features have been planned, as well. A few examples, some of which are already complete:
- Players will have different expectations of playing time and will refuse to resign if their demands are not satisfied
- An overhauled injury module which will expand upon the hidden injury proneness statistic which may cause players to retire early if they continually take a beating
- Different clubs will have more clearly different characteristics: while the old game uses memberships as a proxy, a team will have both a short term and a long term prestige ranking which will affect whether players want to sign with the club. This will allow you to define your own challenge - take over a strong team with a proud background, a struggling team with a proud background, or a struggling team with no background whatsoever and you'll experience more a clearly defined challenge with each club
- Teams will also have presidents/board members, who will change over time, with different levels of patience for the head coach
- Traveling interstate will now have a greater impact on player fatigue - something to watch out for if managing a club on the west coast!
- An improved narrative structure
- A sandbox mode, which will allow you to match up two teams of your choice.
There's also a few things that are needed: if you have any knowledge on the salary structure for state leagues or have knowledge of different positioning strategies in dead-ball situations, especially kicking into the forward 50 from a marked position, please get in touch! This will help make the game more realistic.
Thank you for your support of Australian Football Coach!