Director of Football

[BOT-Brad]

Director of Football (somewhat of a 'working title') started life as a small idea I had many years ago, and has constantly evolved and changed as I thought of new mechanics and ways of implementing features. The ultimate premise goes something like this;

You will choose a club to wish to be hired as a Director of Football (Sporting Director/General Manager). The board will allocate the operational budget of the club, and almost everything else is left up to you at a higher level. Hiring the manager, coaches, scouts, physios and other members of staff, and of course, giving the 'green-light' for transfer incomings and outgoings. Managing ticket and merchandise prices, settings the budgets for the scouting network and your youth team.

Will you focus on youth players, in an attempt to 'cash-in' on them later on? Or will you attempt to take on debt early on in order to grow quicker, but potentially steer the club into financial ruin (and the termination of your job!)? Or perhaps a slower, patient growth as a club, slowly climbing the footballing ladder, spending only what the club can afford?

Can you keep your fans happy and the money flowing out of their pockets? Can you remain competitive when other clubs have much larger budgets than your own? Will you stand by a struggling manager during the hard times, or throw him under the bus and replace him when times get tough? Can you guarantee to the board that the player you wish to sign is the next big thing, and not the next big flop?

Welcome to Director of Football!

Current Status
In Early Development!

Notes
Right now, I have been working on the game during my free time for around a month. Much of the internal database systems and match simulation system is in-place, although will undergo changes as new features are implemented. I will hope to keep a regular development log here over the coming weeks/months, although I hope to have the game somewhat playable as soon as I can, hopefully within a few months at most.

You can currently (As of v 0.0.6) simulate through multiple seasons, with semi-realistic team fluctuations and promotion/relegation working. Playoffs and relegation playoffs are not yet simulated, although they are pretty much done in the latest dev branch and will be coming soon-ish.

Download / Follow
You can follow the project along, as well as download release candidates on GitHub. Please note that the game is still nothing more than a little "simulator demo" right now.

Giant Wall of Screenshots









More screenshots can be seen in the Imgur album.

Closing Notes
I hope you like the look of the game, even if the gameplay is a bit absent right now! I am always open to suggestions and criticism. Thanks for reading!

[ivan]

Not bad. I used to play the Football Manager series so I get the motivation behind these sorts of games.
Good job, I see that you put in a lot of effort.
For me, a game of this genre has to deliver in either the UI department or the simulation (preferably in the latter).
And it's very difficult to impress in either one of these areas.

[Fenrir]

Wow the work is amazing on the UI side, are you using any existing lib or everything is self made?

[BOT-Brad]

Not bad. I used to play the Football Manager series so I get the motivation behind these sorts of games.
Good job, I see that you put in a lot of effort.
For me, a game of this genre has to deliver in either the UI department or the simulation (preferably in the latter).
And it's very difficult to impress in either one of these areas.

I agree completely. Right now I am constantly tweaking and improving the UI, while the simulation is a little basic right now. I have pages of notes on how to get the simulation feeling right (in theory at least), but right now I need to get a little more of the game infrastructure setup before I can add in the "meat" of the simulation engine. Thanks!

Wow the work is amazing on the UI side, are you using any existing lib or everything is self made?

The UI is designed by myself, with different components using my own library which only handles buttons, panels and textboxes right now, but more will be added once I need them. Thanks!

[BOT-Brad]

A few new little screens showing the players that get generated when you select a team to control/work for.







The players pre-generated for the team when you start a new game are given a nationality (currently 80% home nation, 20% random), which will eventually be determined from the league you start in (e.g. the Premier League has say 40% english players, 60% 'other' nationality, whereas League Two has maybe like 80% english, 20% 'other', same for other leagues included).

Their initial stats are generated according to the team strengths in the 3 main areas, defence, midfield and attack. Their hidden stats are somewhat semi-random, but also generally based on the overall team strength (So the better teams will generally have better young players, although not always). The players wage is calculated based on a few factors including age, overall rating and a few hidden ratings, and a bit of random variation. The contract is currently just randomly set between 1 and 5 years.

I am slowly adding the name generators to each nation, with only England sort of semi-done right now. I plan on adding a system which produces an approximate player value, to give you an idea of how valuable the player is and how much you could perhaps get if you were to sell him. Again, it will work it out from the players stats (visible and hidden) and age.

I plan on eventually adding a "masking" system to the player rating and value. For example, if you have poor coaches and manager, then the player rating could be a range from 60-70, without you knowing his "true" ability rating. But better coaches/manager will narrow that perhaps to 66-68, or even just narrow it straight down to the value. Same applies for the transfer value, meaning you could sell a player for much less than his actual worth if you have poor quality staff members. Also working on making a screen for the players in your team, where you can view information such as their happiness, contract negotiations, stats such as goals scored, appearances, average rating, as well as a little window which shows the managers current opinion of the player. Also other things such once I think of them .

[BOT-Brad]

Lots of new things added over the past 10 days! Actual win/lose/fun gameplay is slowly creeping in, although there is still nothing "interactive" where your actions affect the simulation right now. I am taking it slow, ensuring nothing is causing any issues, and fixing little bugs that have slipped through the net so far.

Message System


Firstly, there is a cool new message system added. Right now, only a few initial messages are generated, then a targets message every season. This will the primary way to convey news to the player, such as interesting news stories, players unhappy, manager targets, and much more.
The red messages are marked as urgent and will require immediate attention, stopping you from advancing the game until they are dealt with. Right now this doesn't happen (as there is no way to respond to them yet), but will be added soon.

Achievement System

A rudimentary achievement system has been added in. Everbody loves achievements, right?.....right? Right now, only 2 exist. Win a game, and reach the end of a season. Not planning to add to this until the game is more fleshed out, but helped me re-order the database code to check every week for any achievements and at discrete points in time (end of game, managerial sacking, etc.)

Match Centre


The Match Centre has been added in now! It still is very basic, just showing the score. The time ticks away and shows the score that the simulation engine is generating. This screen will further show the lineup your manager has selected (including some stats on the players such as current league apps and goals, and avg. rating), will also show stats such as possesion, shots, corners, etc. (Once they are added to live-game match engine, currently just uses simulation engine), and also other little things such as a score updates from other games in the league.

Pie Charts

Pie Charts bottom right. Need I say any more?

Backend Stuff
On the backend of the game, every player in your team is now given a rudimentary 'value', giving you an idea how much you could expect to recieve if you were to sell the player. The finance system has been standardised to allow different currencies to be used, currently GBP, USD and EUR are supported, and a choice will be added to the Settings page soon.
Also, an operation budget is now calculated at the start of the game. This is generated from some basic data about the team you selected, and generally produces fairly accurate-ish data without needing to add custom money data into the database (which would be tiring for every team in the game).

[I~=Spam]

Looking good! As the others said amazing GUI! It is really shaping out into something very neat.

[BOT-Brad]

Looking good! As the others said amazing GUI! It is really shaping out into something very neat.

Thanks! I'm enjoying working on the game during my free time, and have filled a 30-page notebook of ideas and gameplay mechanics which I plan on adding. Unfortunately, as I cross 1 new feature off my list, another 3 or 4 appear on it!

[I~=Spam]

Unfortunately, as I cross 1 new feature off my list, another 3 or 4 appear on it!

That happens to me sometimes to.

[SiENcE]

I would be interested how do you simulate the matches? What approach to you choose to simulate this complicated game.

thx.