And so it begins...30 years after the original idea...

So, some thirty (30) years (WTF?!?) after having the original idea for a soccer manager game that doesn’t use statistics, but plain English instead, here I am.

The game (Samuel Bromley’s No Stats Soccer Manager) is a football (soccer) manager sim that is aimed at mobile phones, with the possibility of desktop versions later. The team and league that you manage in is strictly amateur, and the world of ‘SBNSSM’ is quite unlike that of professional leagues such as the English Premier League or Spanish La Liga.

The type of trials that you will face as manager of one of the 12 teams in the league include trying to ensure that your players do not spend the week eating too much fast food, or dragging them out of a bar on the night before the game! Can you persuade your star striker’s girlfriend to let him play this weekend, and not go shopping?

And because there are no statistics, you must really read what the newspapers are saying about your players. You must also listen to the coach, and if you really want to, you can read social media posts from fans of the team.

What I have worked on so far

After getting to grips with the basics of Construct 3, I played around with some arrays, and variables. I needed to call on the help of Laurence Bedford, a fellow UK Construct 3 user to help me to build some of the game ‘screens’ while I work on things that I understand more at this present moment.

About a week or so in to the creation of the game, I have built the bulk of a ‘bio’ screen for a player, which gives an overview of the player’s personality, attributes (such as height, foot used etc), and most importantly, what the local newspapers think about him.

You can see how Terry Williams fairs in the image below, as an example.

Laurence has worked on the squad screen, and is currently working on the screen that helps you to pick your team for the upcoming game.

Things to work on next are:

Fixtures screen Fan messages …and everything else…it should be an interesting year of development!