February 2019 has been a big month for AFC2019, the newest version currently under development, and it's ready enough to start showing off some of the new screenshots!
But first, quick news about the current version of the game: Version 0.19.11 has been pushed fixing an end-of-season 2019 bug. If the game continues to crash, please send your save game file so the crash can be isolated and a patch will be uploaded as quickly as possible.
Now onto the new stuff! Development this month has been focused around player movement - the drafts, free agency, trades, delistings, and zoning, so the first two screenshots will show what the AFC 2019 will have in store in terms of list management.
It's important to note the game's still currently in alpha, and hiring a graphic designer's on the to-do list. Clearly there's still a ways to go yet - the background image isn't even scaled to the proper resolution, there wasn't enough time before the arbitrary deadline of the end of the month! - but the basic layout has been completed and it's working really well! It's much easier to navigate than the current version, which admittedly can be a bit awkward at times. It's set up to handle multiple human coaches simultaneously, unlike the current version. You can also create your own skins if you choose to do so.
That being said if you want to help out with the graphic design please get in touch.
First up, the league player list! This displays every single player currently playing in the league and one of the most important new features: player status! Each player's status affects their expectations - Superstars and key players will be very unhappy to be left out of the squad. Competitive Aging Veterans who haven't won a flag yet may request a trade to a team with an open premiership window.
The "competitive" part as well should be noted. Each player has their own specific personality, including a couple holdovers from the current version - homesickness and greed - but also loyalty (which affects the likelihood of signing a new contract with the same team and general happiness), ambition (which affects how much winning or losing impacts a player's happiness, including their desire to sign with a winning team), and spotlight (could rename this one in the future, but players that want to be in the spotlight will sign with more prestigious teams.) A couple more attributes are planned as well.
Player morale has also been implemented, but it's not quite ready to show off here. Your team will have certain events happen over the course of the season which may affect morale in certain ways. More importantly, events will occur to every single team and the AI will be prepared to handle them in their own way as well. As has been noted in a previous development blog, there's actually no human interaction in the game world yet - it's very important from the design point of view to drop you directly into a robust game world, so everything you respond to the AI will have to consider in exactly the same way. While the current version tries to do this as well, it's programmed in a way where a lot of the AI occurs separately from the user - for instance, in the current version, there's separate code for when the AI proposes a trade to a human manager than for when an AI proposes a trade to a non-human manager. It seems minor, but has a huge impact on how the game's developed.
The child model has also been rewritten from scratch. Each player will produce up to a target number of children starting at a random age. Players will "get pregnant" regardless of gender, though female players will suffer a long-term "injury" sometime during the first trimester. Each child will have a certain interest in footy and a certain potential. At the age of 16, the child will decide if they want to embark on a footy career and either find themselves zoned in state or on a reserves team somewhere, or "vanish" into their actual real schoolwork/job. In the current version, children were only generated if a player played in over 100 matches in their career for father-son training.
Training will be rewritten from scratch as well, though it will look ultimately similar to the current version - instead of micromanaging a training plan, you'll be given the option of how hard you want to train your players by selecting different training types each day. Fatigue will also be completely redone - one neat thing about the fatigue model at the moment means teams which play in a different state than their home state lose a day for travel, which causes fatigue, based on the effects travel has on Perth players generally, which will be something for you to manage.
The most amount of work this month has been on list management, however. The AI now interacts much more intelligently to list creation. The list manager position has been created and each team has their own list manager with their own biases, including favoring youth or veterans, and favoring the draft to free agency (list managers can favor both youth and free agency, or veterans and the draft - for instance, the latter means they'll target veterans in free agency but also be more likely to trade players for draft picks.) Still to be done is getting the AI to sign intelligent contracts - unlike the current version, the framework is in place for you to offer different salaries in different contract years, so you can front-load or back-load a contract as needed, but it's not yet used. The trade code should be done by the end of the weekend.
If you're managing a state team, zoning has been completely implemented too. State leagues were awkwardly implemented in the current version, but the new version lets you top up your list with zoned players. Here's an example of Norwood's zoned player list in the South Australian league:
Not all leagues will have zones, either.
Some other touches have been implemented - for instance, note the 365-day calendar, and the developer's incessant need for North Melbourne to start the season 14-2 (this is a placeholder.) But there's been more little touches added too, including secondary stadiums and the traditional "stadium clashes" - no two games can be played in the same stadium on the same day, to name a few.
Looking forward to showing you the development as it continues into March!