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.
2018 was awesome
Happy New Year!
2018 was a great year for Basketball GM. The game is better than ever. Well of course I'm a biased source, but it's not just me saying that. The stats speak for themselves.
2018 set new records in all those categories! The last column is the craziest... you guys collectively spent over 100 years playing Basketball GM in 2018. In other words, at any given time, there were on average 100 people playing Basketball GM.
New options: hard/soft cap and playoff byes
I just deployed a new version of Basketball GM with three changes:
The ability to change from a soft cap (default) to a hard cap.
An option to give playoff teams first round byes.
An option to set the number of playoff rounds and the number of games per round.
Okay, #3 was already there, but now you can easily change it in the God Mode options, along with the two brand new features.
More realistic contracts and draft history in new leagues
In the bad old days, before about a year ago, new leagues started with a bunch of randomly created players. The age and talent distributions were somewhat arbitrary. After playing for several seasons, those distributions would shift, which was kind of annoying. In practice, there was more talent at the beginning of a new league than in a league at its "steady state" many years in, which I will call an "established league" in the rest of this post.
This has been fixed for about a year. I fixed it by generating new leagues with simulated draft classes of players, so that the age and talent distributions would be exactly the same in a new league and a established league. It was a great success! But there were still some differences between new leagues and established leagues.
"Untouchable" players and picks in trades
When you're trying to make a trade, you can click the "What would make this deal work?" button to get a counter offer from the AI team you're trading with. Often this results in the AI asking for something you really don't want to give up, like your best player or a high draft pick. Then what you really want to say to the AI is, "okay, you can't have that, but is there any other assets I have that could make this deal work?" But there was no way to ask that. Until now!
Lots of small UI improvements
Today I released an update to Basketball GM containing a lot of small improvements to the UI. Most of them are small tweaks that, when seen in aggregate, will hopefully just make the game feel a bit cleaner and smoother.
But there's also some sexy.
A few recent minor improvements
When I make a small improvement to Basketball GM, it feels silly to write a whole blog post about it. But if I don't, some people will never realize what happened. So maybe this is a good idea: a single blog post explaining several recent small improvements.
Difficulty levels
Today I released a new feature: difficulty levels! You can pick whether you want the difficulty of your league to be easy, normal, hard, or insane. You can do this when starting a new league, or you can change it at any time by going to Tools > Options.