Posts tagged "Baseball"
Group regular season schedule into MLB-like 3/4 game series
When developing ZenGM Baseball last year, there were a bunch of things I wanted to do but decided to leave for later. Can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good! One of those was the regular season schedule. In baseball, due to the large number of games with few days off resulting in the need to minimize travel, teams usually play 3-4 games against the same opponent, which is called a "series".
In the initial release of ZenGM Baseball, there were no series, games were randomly ordered just like the other sports. Now that is changed - there is a new setting called "Group Games Into Series" that is enabled by default in ZenGM Baseball, so it will apply for future seasons in all leagues unless you disable it. (For other sports it's disabled by default, but you can enable it if you want a baseball-like schedule.)
The end result is the schedule looks more like a baseball schedule:
That's the general idea. Read on for all the details, if you're curious.
ZenGM Baseball
When I was a kid, I was obsessed with baseball. My dad says this dates back to watching the Mets win the 1986 World Series when I was a baby, but I don't remember that. I do remember my favorite childhood book. This was back before normal people had the Internet, and sites like baseball-reference didn't exist yet. But I had this giant book of baseball stats going back to the beginning of professional baseball. Just page after page of tables - standings, stats, playoff results, awards, etc. I would sit there reading those tables of stats without ever getting bored.
Baseball simulation games are the type of thing that a kid like me would get obsessed with. Except, they didn't exist yet. Well, they did exist even before computers as tabletop games, but I didn't know about them. The first real baseball simulation game that I heard of was Baseball Mogul back in the late 90s. It's still being updated today, you should check it out. I've talked about Baseball Mogul before as a big inspiration for Basketball GM, since as a got older I grew to like basketball more than baseball and I wanted a similar game for basketball.
And yet, baseball still exists, and there's still nothing quite like watching a good baseball game. After making football and hockey versions of Basketball GM, it's only natural to use that infrastructure for my first love, the only remaining major American sport.
So here it is: ZenGM Baseball
I've been working on this the past few months, which is why updates to the other games have been slow. Expect those updates to return to their normal pace soon.
ZenGM Baseball is definitely not perfect. But I did get a lot of help beta testing it from users on Discord, so hopefully it's at least somewhat good. As always, feedback is welcome.