It took until Wednesday to finish the work started last week on opening up the Origin mode. It is now operational in the beta, which got a 0.4.0 point update after a full seven days of being stuck on 0.3.16. These numbers are arbitrary of course, it just felt right. I talked a fair bit about it last week so I don’t need to go over its intricacies, suffice it to say that I got the auto-generation code up to a point where it will run without incident, which for my immediate purposes is enough even though there is still a lot of balancing work to do in other areas of the game before it is truly ready.
The rest of the week was spent on the Journeys mode, which is the name I am using for what would would in a roleplaying game be called missions or quests. The template for this mode is Missions in Star Trek Timelines. Incorporating this RPG-style mini-game in a sports title is a risk, and I suspect it will take a while to get coaches who cut their teeth on Madden and Football Manager used to the concept.
As with most of the elements of Mr Football during both the crunch and the beta, I came into it with the Phaser code mostly in place and the remaining work mostly at the back end. This gave me some quick “wins” as I looked at the Phaser scenes for the first time in over a year, and took not much time at all to get them up and running. The only tweak needed was updating the particle emitter code to take into account changes made in Phaser 3.60, which didn’t take long and gave me some sugar hits.
Missions in STT are fairly simplistic in a visual sense, something which encouraged me in the first place that I could do my best in my game and still make it compelling despite my lack of experience if I got the game design right. All it is going to take is a bit of juice from particle effects like the above and getting the UI to zing so that coaches can race through scenes in quick succession, and this mode can add a lot of fun to the core game loop. Specifically, as with narrative-based RPGs, Journeys can be a vehicle for storytelling – communicating the flavour of the milieu in what Blood Bowl‘s designers call “fluff” – if I can get the writing… right.
I had gone nearly five years with a plan to run two types of Journeys with exactly the same set of screens and rulesets: Community for 2- to 4-star cards simulating player outreach to fans, and Media Street for 3s to 5s as a way to bring journalists and other content creators into the story of the footy industry. At some point in the last year I had the bright idea to use the same system to act as rewards for unlocking Legends (effectively six-star cards), something which I was inspired to do by Dislyte‘s commitment to creating a playable backstory mission for each and every one of its 50+ characters (called Side Tales). I suspect that third kind of Journey, called Flashbacks, will have to wait until Season 2 as I will have my hands full with fleshing out the core game next year.
This week, I realised that I probably should have a Journey mode for 1- to 3-star cards as well, similarly to how STT’s Cadet Challenges reuse the same mechanics as the main story Missions, restricted to a small number of lesser cards. You’re supposed to be a new coach at a footy club, so it makes sense to simulate establishment of minimum standards of player behaviour inside and outside the club. Thus the Culture mode was born for 1- to 3-star cards.
As with last week, while it was fun to get the Phaser code running, the main body of work is still in the LAMP environment to assemble databases of all the different kinds of journeys, and output JSON files with content to fuel opposing dice rolls. Unlike the match modes, it wasn’t as “simple” as figuring out how to auto-generate opponent teams of gradually increasing strength. Each quest has to be written from scratch, thematically linked, each link in the chain of events connected to each other in the flow of the quest progression.
As with many parts of the Mr Football crunch and beta periods, I was picking up code that I had worked on over a year before, and had left in varying levels of completion. One of the crucial parts of STT’s Missions is the centrality of Traits, restricting participation to certain players and giving bonuses to those with rare ones. Traits were one of those systems that I had to leave until very late in the development process because it would have been a waste of time compiling a list for players that would have been out of the league by the time I released the game. Now the time has come to complete that project, which meant a bit of think music on how to assign traits to game characters based on living people.
I started off with the five-factor model of personality as a framework to think about possible trait names, in another one of my two-dimensional colour-coordinated charts. I made some effort at sorting them into negative and positive descriptions of universal human characteristics, but it soon became clear that I was not quite going about it in the right way.
Australia has a rich history of colourful language to refer to personal character. That’s a fancy way of saying that we like to call a spade a f***ing shovel! Mr Football will be leaning heavily into Strine as a signifier of its deep grounding in our country’s culture, which can lead to some dangerous areas if I include traits with the wrong implication. It’s a tricky balancing act: to be respectful enough with edgy jokes and be seen as merely a rascal or larrikin, rather than going too far into the realm of insult and risking a label of being a ratbag or yobbo.
My objective in starting to compile a matrix of traits was to represent the neural diversity of all kinds of personalities. However, some of the axes in those spectra are more useful to footy teams than others. Calmness in the face of stress is generally more constructive than outright anxiety. Introverts tend to not go well in group environments. Agreeableness is far more desirable in a teammate than carelessness. I was trying to find ways to balance out the traits like they were Dungeons & Dragons alignments, but that’s just not realistic in the context of a pro sports team.
This is not the first time I have wasted a day or more delving fruitlessly into a rabbit hole. Perhaps that’s part of a healthy process in game development sometimes, as you have to convince yourself of the right course by traversing a wrong one now and then.
I expect it will take most of next week to bed down the Journey systems, even if I have to open just one of the three core modes because it will take longer to create enough content for the others. That, along with the Selection system which is merely refactoring the existing Versus scene to save different 22s, will be enough to open up the beta to all comers.