It is the start of my kids’ third school term (of four) today, and I have been thinking about the timeline to actually release Mr Football as a mobile game. Visualisation is important for me, and at times like this I like to make colour-coded spreadsheets to put my jumbled thoughts into some sort of order.
This is the second of my self-organisational aids. The first has been a simple text file I have maintained for years called “List of things”, which includes loose headings like “Scenes to build”, “Features to add”, “Bugs to fix” and “Integrated systems to build”. That file started out on my development PC and laptop but has now migrated to a Notes file on my phone, so that I can look at it in idle moments while out with the kids. I add task items as I think of them, and delete them when I have finished them. As a workflow tool it is fairly unstructured, but that suits my ADD-riddled mind. (Yes, I got an official ADD diagnosis, and yes, I am on the right drugs.)
The spreadsheet tells me I have all but finished the design phase, which is why the Wiki is just about complete as I have poured out all my thoughts into it… even if some of the implementation of those ideas is still only at the concept phase. Phaser scenes have mostly been started and most are near completion save for some tinkering. I gave “HUD features” its own section because that scene does a lot of work across a wide number of scenes, appearing as an overlay to all of them and frequently spawning popups and dialogs. Its function list is still growing. The Match modes are just about done – that took months of work as it required Three.js integration – while Journeys are a lot simpler in 2D and involve a relatively small amount of dice rolls, with the complexity coming from the UI which is mostly done.
The Firebase elements are fairly straightforward, I have the syntax down pat now so leaving it til late in the project is not going to be a problem. I can do the PHP stuff in my sleep given my decades of Web development experience with FanFooty, plenty of muscle memory there. (When I say PHP stuff, I mean that the databases of player cards, PvE opponent teams, Journey event chains, items and town names are created, maintained and updated on a LAMP Web server which then spits out JSON text files for use in the game and will output automatically to the WordPress wiki.)
The third file aid I created last night is called Sequences: a very short outline of the tasks yet to complete, organised into timelines so I can perform them sequentially. They have been grouped into four streams: onboarding, items, Match modes and Journey modes.
Outlines are powerful tools for organising your own thoughts, Dave Winer taught me that. This file may seem simple, but it crystallises the impressionist rainbow explosion of the spreadsheet into a discrete set of instructions to myself. Tasks in each of the streams do not necessarily need the earlier tasks to be completed before starting them but it makes logical sense to do them in this order, especially for the onboarding as that is the sequence in which users will encounter them.
I have given myself the next ten weeks to complete these four streams, with a view to launching a beta in October. Serendipitously, PAX Australia happens in my home town of Melbourne on the first weekend of October. Perhaps I should do something about that. However, I realise that there is still a lot of work to do and I may not hit that crunch target. Setting a deadline focuses the mind – especially for an old journalist like me! – and it gives me anticipation of the mental sugar hit that hitting a milestone provides. I will try to not let the distinct possibility of blowing through the deadline destroy my self-confidence, though, as I am still a stay-at-home dad who works another job on weekends. I am very conscious of not wanting to burn myself out with a sprint halfway through what I have always planned to be a marathon. If I don’t make it to PAX with a beta to wave around, that will be fine.
I am still not quite decided about whether the beta should be restricted to mobiles or also on browsers. I suspect the approval process is going to annoy me on mobiles, and adding browser support would give me a lot more flexibility… though it would inevitably leak, and I might disappoint punters who see an unfinished, buggy, lagging game. Plus it would mean implementing in-app purchases on browsers, which is a whole other set of code that would add a lot of complexity to the beta process.
As for a soft launch after the beta is complete, that would have to happen in Q1 2024 in the lead up to AFL round 1. I have always said that season 1 of Mr Football would be a test run, so my hopes for immediate success would not be Sean Darcy-sized. I realise as a sole developer making his first game that I am going to make mistakes and stuff ups, so a full year to iron out the Rene Kinks would be advisable for all concerned. One only has to look at Big Ant’s AFL 23 launch for a salutary example of not meeting (insanely high) user expectations – no disrespect to them, it’s just that Australians see the extremely well-funded American product and wonder why they can’t have something just as good.
Consumer demand is a healthy thing, don’t get me wrong, it makes creators want to do better. I could just as easily point to the early years of FanFooty where the site got a bad reputation for being unusable due to insanely high demand. I figured out how to make FanFooty work eventually, so will Big Ant with its regained AFL licence, and so (hopefully) will I with Mr Football.
My ultimate aim is to make a game good enough to merit an official licence – even if getting that licence doesn’t happen, for Byzantine industry reasons. Coming into meetings before season 2, I want to be able to point to some track record of public interest in the game and technical delivery. Then, maybe, we can get somewhere with some deals to unlock the full potential of the concept.