Archive for the ‘Game Development’ Category
And lo, it came to pass that Sports Interactive announced their plans for the gameworlds. And it saw that it was good. But has the rest of the community? SI’s announcement, in two testaments, has outlined not only the future structure of the gameworlds (part the first) but also what is to be done with the current worlds as they stand (part the second). Duffy 3:14 – “On the first day, SI cocked up.” First up was the confession. Sports Interactive and SEGA have made a number of mistakes over the previous 12 months. Some seem to have taken this as a sign of weakness, but to me it shows a great level of honesty and self-awareness. Of course, in an ideal…
We started our look at the major changes coming in 1.4 with the Reputation System because it is the key to several other featured changes, the new system for player injuries is certainly one of them. If you haven’t read the article about the reputation changes then do so, even the current system is unclear to many who have played football manager live for a year. The new system will hopefully be easier to understand and represented clearer in game, but it is a major shift from what is in play now and getting to understand it will be important. So how are injuries changing? There were two key areas looked at when it came to changing the way injuries are treated within…
The more interesting GamesIndustry discusses the idea of starting at 110% rather than the slow and sure approach with MMOs: “Most MMOGs launch with queues to access their servers – worse again, many of them then end up offering players barren, half-empty servers when the player population falls after the first few months.” Lump in throat I read on… “The game service operator then faces an extremely tricky balancing act. Too few servers will result in enormous queues for the game, which frustrate and upset players – not a good move when your business model relies on them being so pleased with their experience in the first thirty days that they’ll happily…
The coming 1.4 update promises a number of major changes to the way FML is played, changes that will affect the way you play. Whilst some come amid a huge amount of expectation like the Youth Academies, others will appear at first to be less significant. The reputation system could possibly be seen as one of those, but on closer inspection it is the very cornerstone upon which many other changes rely. That makes it very important to understand in it’s own right, the future success of your club depends on that. Your club’s reputation is the driving factor in determining how much income you can receive, both in terms of setting stadium income levels and also…
Firstly, from an article on BrightHub: “Where Did Warhammer Go Wrong” caught my attention. The main point being the obvious, need enough gameplay variety to entertain hundreds of thousands or millions of different people. They must be amused enough to maintain a subscription.” It’s funny that the same opinions voiced in the Football Manager Live official forums are voiced as a general statement elsewhere. The newest match engine is now in FMLive. Now people are turning their heads to changing their online experience to keep them online for longer. Keep people interested so that they stay on for longer will result in people playing more Human vs Human…
Always staying on top of the latest developments, Jakswan has recently posted a rough outline on the new injury mechanics being tested in the Football Manager Live v1.4 beta worlds. While the details are still being worked on behind the scenes, tweaked and liable to change before release, it is likely to cause a major shift in the way managers assemble and maintain their squad. Currently in Football Manager Live, we have an injury system that is purely time-based. Once a player hobbles off the pitch during a match, that injury can become of the “sticky” variety and see him unavailable for play for a certain period of actual real-world time. Whether it’s simply 6-12…
Start making a game and stop listening to idiots… It’s not often that I don’t have an opinion about something and this original thread started by Goodyscot, caught me: “In seeking to please the vocal minority you’ve managed to alienate and ignore every lesson you should of been learning from other MMO’s”. What do I actually know about MMOs? My answer, not very much. To explain how I got started in Football Manager Live, when at university I was in halls with about 9 other like-minded friends. We would regularly get together over a few beers, get CM97/98 out and press “done” for hours at a time. Each of us had our own team, player searches would cause an…
In line with the constant development model of Football Manager Live, work on the 1.4 update began even before the release of the 1.3 version to live game worlds. Utilising the three beta worlds currently available for FML testing, one game world (Miller) is used to constantly progress the newest future developments, and the other two (Horton and Coppell) are used to test any required interim updates to fix minor issues revealed once the current update code is released to live worlds. Often though, a number of the bigger changes are discussed in depth in the beta forums before any code is written, and 1.4 has a number of game defining changes that have gone through…
