Schedule and playoff seeding improvements
I deployed two changes today in version 2019.08.31.0916.
The regular season schedule is more balanced. All teams will play an equal number of home and away games, and all teams will have one home game and one away game with each other team in their division.
Division winners are guaranteed a top 4 seed in the playoffs, even if they have a worse record than some non division winners.
As always, let me know if you notice any problems!
A few small improvements
No huge news here, sorry, but there are a few minor improvements in version 2019.08.18.0097:
A lot more tables (such as Draft Summary) are searchable, filterable, and downloadable. There's still a few that aren't. Let me know if that's a problem. Also let me know if I messed anything up with this change, since the table component is used in many many places!
In the past, when you got fired, the AI would never actually change your finance settings back to something reasonable. So if you made them unreasonable, the results would look silly. Now the AI resets their finance settings every year.
The Hall of Fame cutoff adjusts based on the number of games in a season and the length of a quarter. Previously, short leagues would have empty HoFs and long leagues would have tons of HoFers.
Specifically, the cutoff is multiplied by
sqrt(quarterLength / 12) * numGames / 82. The square root is to account for fatigue in games - shorter games mean the starters play a higher fraction of the game (and the cutoff should be a bit higher) and longer games mean the opposite.
As always, let me know if you notice any problem with this stuff, or if you have any other feedback!
Which NBA players take the most shots with their foot on the three point line? (hint: not James Harden)
I'm going to deal with a very important question today. Which NBA players sacrificed the most points by taking shots with their foot on the three point line? This may seem like a silly question, but given the well-documented difficulty of assessing whether a player's foot was on the line or not, I think it deserves a serious analysis.
Achievements in Football GM
Today I added some achievements to Football GM. You can see them on your account page. Most of them were copied over from Basketball GM with some small modifications.
The current achievements are:
New achievements
Today I added some new achievements to Basketball GM. You can see them on your account page.
Most of these were suggested by users, so if you see something here that you told me about, even if it was a long time ago... see, I am listening!
The new achievements are:
Far future draft classes
For a long time, Basketball GM has let you view draft classes up to three years in the future. Similarly, for people making custom roster files, it's been possible to define up to three years of draft classes in the file.
But what if you want more? Like if you want to make a file for the NBA in 2003, with every draft class up to today? Previously that wasn't possible, but now it is.
So you want to write a sports simulation game
So you want to write a sports simulation game. Great! As someone who has written a sports simulation game, hopefully I can help you.
I get this question sometimes from people who know a bit of programming and would like to make a sports simulation game, but feel overwhelmed or don't quite know where to start. I know this feeling well. I wanted to make Basketball GM for a long time before I actually felt comfortable trying. Before that, I thought it seemed too complicated for me and I'd fail horribly if I tried.
How do you get past that? Well if I wanted an easy answer, I could say go look at the Basketball GM source code and be done with it. But that's a bad answer. If you don't know where to start and feel overwhelmed at the idea of making your own game, you'll feel that even more strongly when trying to understand my code. Basketball GM has been in development for years now, and the codebase has grown large and somewhat complicated. But at its core, a sports simulation game can be much simpler.
Frivolities
One thing I like about Basketball Reference is their Frivolities page. It's a bunch of unrelated tools that are mostly useless unless you have some very specific curiosity. And it's awesome! Not everything needs to have mass market appeal. Not everything needs to be serious and important. Frivolities are great.
Now Basketball GM (and Football GM) has frivolities too, as of version 2019.05.27.0877. Within a league, go to Tools > Frivolities to see them. Currently there are four tools - two of them inspired by Basketball Reference, and two of my own.
Most Games, No Playoffs - like Basketball Reference, this lists players with the most games played who never made the playoffs.
Relatives - lists players with relatives in the game. It also lets you click an individual player and to view his immediate family, and from there you can click other family members to explore the family tree. There is a link pointing to the individual family page from a player's main profile page if he has relatives.
Roster Continuity - like Basketball Reference, this is a color-coded visualization of year-to-year changes in roster composition.
Tragic Deaths - a list of all the tragic deaths that have occurred in your league. This would be a little dark for Basketball Reference I think, but for fake players in a video game, it's good clean fun!
Draft lottery updates
Today I made a few changes to the draft lottery.
First, it now uses the same method the NBA will be using for the 2019 NBA draft. However there is an option in God Mode to switch it back to the old lottery method, or to disable the lottery entirely.
There is also now better support for non-standard league configurations. In the past, the lottery was always 14 teams, which is the number of non-playoff teams in a default league. But for leagues with different numbers of teams or different playoff lengths, you would then either get playoff teams in the lottery or non-playoff teams missing the lottery. Now it will adjust the number of lottery teams so it is always equal to the number of non-playoff teams.
Welcome to Football GM!
Hello everyone! I am very excited to bring you Football GM. Football GM is an American football management simulator, where you are in charge of a team. You don't play the actual game of football, but you draft players, trade players, sign free agents, handle the finances, and set the lineup.
Football GM is based on my other game, Basketball GM. I spent a lot of time on abstracting the code such that most of the code is shared between games, meaning that both games will improve together. Fixing a bug or adding a feature to one will also improve the other. It's been a challenge, but it does work. Basketball GM has secretly been based on this shared code base for months.
While there are a lot of similarities to Basketball GM, there are a lot of differences too. Football is inherently a more random sport - it's lower scoring, there are fewer games, and the playoffs are single elimination. This means it's easier to get lucky and win, but it's harder to have sustained success. Team building is also more complicated in football, since there are more players, more positions, and the positions matter a lot more - you don't have players like LeBron who can do everything. Finances are also different. Football GM operates under a hard cap like the NFL, but Basketball GM uses a soft cap like the NBA.
One of the fun things about simulation games is that all of those differences are customizable. If you enable God Mode, you can make the Football GM season last 82 games, have best-of-7 playoff series, and increase the length of games so that the number of touchdowns in a football game is more similar to the number of field goals in a basketball game.
That's just one silly example of what you can do with a sports simulation game. Really, it's up to your imagination. That's been the best part of Basketball GM for years, and I hope Football GM brings people the same kind of fun.
Football GM is a lot better than Basketball GM was when it was first released, but it's still rough around the edges in many places. I know that. I'm working on it. But I think it's good enough to be fun now.
Feedback is always appreciated. Even more so since it's new. Please let me know what you think.