This isn't really the March development update anymore, but it's been put off so that work on the game can continue.
The most recent work's been pretty unglamorous, but a lot has been done. Unlike the last update, where systems like list management were put together well, most of the recent work has been making sure the match engine works properly along with doing front end design work to start to let the human coaches have some control over the game.
The match engine's the big thing at the moment. Once it's done, the game should be ready for alpha testing, but when it's done is still up in the air at this point. While some of the code has been reused from the previous version in other game components, the match engine's a complete rewrite. Because it's more precise than the current game engine, there's a lot of fine tuning to do. One of the suggested ways to simulate the game would be to estimate how many disposals, goals, et cetera each player should have and then create a match engine around that, but then you don't get to watch the action of all of the players running around on the field.
The problem with these sorts of simulations means one minor tweak can have a massive impact. For instance, in a recent version, the followers would bunch around the ball and handball back and forth to each other until one of them broke free, leading to zero marks over the course of the game. The underlying issue was that a player catching a handball was able to dispose of the handball immediately, so the player assigned to tackle the handballer would never get to them, and that handballs were weighted so highly a player never decided to kick to any other players. That hasn't been the only funny issue that's been debugged recently - for instance, a player continually decided to run out a kick-in even though they were well defended, leading to a tackle, turnover, and easy kick at goal for the opposition. The engine's being tested with "superhuman" or infallible footballers - every player on the pitch has their stats maxed out for testing, so it's not as if this fake computer player took one too many hits to the head.
There's a lot of things working nicely though, such as man-on-man defence.
One feature that has been worked on outside the match engine has been the human coaching module and getting everything set up for you to select your team. It's led to more funny issues - the very first time the game ran with a human coach, the selection screen hadn't been set up yet, so no players were selected for the team at all - the opposition faced a game where 18 men played against none, and whoever the ruck hit the ball to would run the ball into the goal without even attempting a pass. (The game wasn't simulated all the way through, but if this is anything to go by, the highest possible score in a game of Aussie Rules has to be somewhere in the low two-thousands.)
More to come in a couple weeks as work continues in earnest.