I don’t want to post any “official dates”, but today I’m working on player transfer, and next week I hope to have done the “end of season” adjustments (players retiring, new youth squad players appearing, possibility for the coach to change team, and so on).

I did a test run for the league – amazing, played 15 league weeks with instant match option, and took me about 1h, making everytime the formation adjustment. Each click takes about 2-3s of calculation time. I’m very proud of it, no more time wasted waiting for the CPU to calculate the match!! 😀

So what’s going on next? after I finish version 1.0, I plan to keep working on it – no pause at all. I’ll listen to player feedback to improve it with new features/additions, first of all the national cups and possibly the international ones. This undoubtly will be my most updated game ever 🙂

Today I’ve been working on the load/save functions. For now I’ll just stick to .csv savefiles. That way I’ll be able to track bugs better than if I was using a normal binary save file. I thought the .csv format might be too slow, but actually, in debug mode (which is much slower than the final release mode) the game takes only 3-4 seconds to load/save a db with 25k players.

In any case I’ll let user change the size of database or which leagues to run in the game options. Also for now, as I already announced, no cups will be present in the initial v1.0 release. Of course as soon as v1.0 is on sale, I’ll start working on adding features in subsequent updates, which will be free for existing customers 🙂 This kind of games (sports managements) are really huge to make, so I guess I’ll never run out of new things to add!

In the meanwhile, take a look at my title screen!

Yes I can proudly say that! The USM2 match engine (at least for version 1.0) is done! that means that still need some testing, but you can play a match and see:

• scoring actions with multiple choices and different results based on your active player skills
• events like penalties, free kicks
• injuries and yellow/red cards
• substitutions
• set your general team strategy: type of attack, counterattack, offside play, type of defensive marking, etc
• change speed of the match
• see in realtime the ratings of players and their fitness value (fatigue) to choose better which one to substitute

So now what’s left for the version 1.0 ? the player transfers and the end of season events – promotion, relegation and such. Also I need to make the possibility for the player to change team during his career. So yes, there’s still quite some work left to do… 😐

Today I made another importan addition… the “set pieces takers assignment”. Now you can set a predefined player to take any of the following set pieces: free kick from long distance, from short distance, penalty kick and corner kick. At first I thought was a small improvement that I could delay on a later update, then I realized during the match itself, that if you’re playing with the events is essential to be able to select which player must take that important free kick nearby the opponent goalie area…!
You can also choose to leave a value to “default” and the CPU will automatically pick a player for you. But maybe won’t be the best one! otherwise what would be your role in the game, just watch it playing itself!? 🙂