I hadn’t realised that I missed two weeks in a row of devlog updates until I opened the Tickle Monster site just now. I have been head down bum up on the trudge to the finish line, and I have finally breasted the tape. Mr Football version 0.5.0 is in the can, which is to say uploaded to the beta server, which can be found at https://mrfootball.io.
I will write a separate blog post to introduce the open beta, so this one will be about the process leading up to it. For completeness’ sake, here are the final three weekly Roadmap screenshots for weeks 10, 11 and 12:
The major shift was in the last week when a lot of elements shifted up one rung, especially in the Modes column. I didn’t quite get Journeys finished in time – it is very close – but I wanted to launch before Christmas with what I had, and this is what I am going with.
The thing that most sticks in my mind about this mini-crunch period was the long-awaited breakthrough in iOS stability, which entailed finally squashing CSS bugs and testing properly on Apple devices. I can’t say that I have definitively nailed down every possible problem, and I probably never will as there are structural issues with running a high-resolution game with 20MB+ of assets in a Web browser, even on modern phones. Safari, in particular, has some opaque scorched-earth internal rules about when its watchdog wakes up and kills a process for being too greedy for resources. I am never going to tame that Cerberus. Crashes happen a lot less often now, nevertheless, and hardly ever on startup, so that’s good enough for a beta launch.
Another thing that has been front of mind over the past few weeks is game design: specifically, the way the game flows from early to mid to late game. I have the advantage in Mr Football of being able to wipe most of the economy clean every year, as Electronic Arts do in EA FC, so I can let the game run at a much higher pace than Star Trek Timelines which it used as a starting point. This means that I can make the Wheel of Football daily prize gacha feature – called Dabo in STT – a lot more accessible, instead of being mostly hid behind a hard currency paywall. It also means I can allow a lot more flexibility in upgrading, fuelled by cheaply-acquired wildcard tokens for items and player cards. STT players save up the soft currency of Merits for months for one five-star citation to upgrade their favourite card; Mr Football can gift the player more than one of those every month in the free Members battle pass track, plus make it much cheaper to buy with the Merit-equivalent currency of Fame. This enables a lot more of that sweet, sweet DING! feeling on a weekly basis.
The increased speed of a season-based gacha RPG has also meant that Trades become a lot more central to the mid-game. Tying the Fame currency to that mechanic provides a nice balance for figuring out how best to use this precious resource: buy tokens from the Treasury to upgrade cards to Complete them and free up a List Space slot, or use them to Trade six undeveloped cards for a higher-rated player? Unfortunately I haven’t figured out what to do with the Credits currency yet, as beyond the rather small cost for merging items, there isn’t a sink for it in-game yet. One of my test accounts currently has two million credits at level 30. That’s a lot! I had had the thought of maybe using it in the Drive event type, a system which I haven’t seen in games before but would be somewhat fluffy (matching the culture of the real sport being simulated) if I balance it correctly.
I am fairly confident that the early game is very solid through about the first 20 coach levels, which is about when the initial supply of tickets starts dwindling and you settle into the daily grind. As it should be, as STT is a pretty great title in the early game, and so is Summoners War which both it and Mr Football are copying. That is just with the Campaign and Origin PvE match modes, so adding Journeys, Iron Man, and the PvP match modes of Ladder and Grade during the beta will merely extend the early game a few more levels.
I have deliberately kept the economy slow to start with, as it’s much easier to gently depress the accelerator than to slam the brakes. I haven’t been able to test how quickly players can get to the late game, which is partly because I haven’t built the late game yet, but that’s going to be a tricky one to manage over the course of Season Zero.
Now I’m just babbling, and there is still plenty of work to do. Milestone: achieved!