Game Design: Developing a sports management game

I don’t remember the first one I played – perhaps it was Soccer Management Simulator on a shareware disk, perhaps Tony La Russa Baseball II if you remove the game’s arcade element. When I learned to program, that was what I wanted to make – something which simulated the outcome of sporting events. I’ve since gone on to program several, including Australian Football Coach 2020.

The landscape now is very different to what it was 25 years ago, though. It’s easier to make a game than ever before, but with the paradox that it’s actually harder to make a game. With increases in technology, I think users now demand a certain level of graphical polish from a game that you didn’t need in the 90s or early 2000s to have a successful game. The tools to make those games are out there, and some amazing games are being made by people who haven’t programmed much if at all before making their game – The First Tree comes to mind.

As a lover of the sports sim genre, this has actually meant games have consolidated. If you want to manage a football team, play Football Manager. If you want to manage a baseball team, you have Out of the Park Baseball. Draft Day Sports has sims for many of the US games. Hockey sims come and go but Franchise Hockey Manager currently holds down the fort there.

Of course, there are others, but the field doesn’t seem as diverse as it did, partially for two reasons: many developers are choosing the online multiplayer route, or develop specifically for mobile, which there’s nothing at all wrong with. That being said, as the market has consolidated, only a small number of companies are really making sports simulation games.

That being said, I’ve encountered a number of people who enjoy and want to write these sorts of games. I recently encountered a question on a Discord thread and wanted to write a couple of posts based on my experience developing Australian Football Coach to help people get started – mostly because I want to play the game that’s kicking around your head!

The following isn’t about actual game development, but considerations you should keep in mind before developing a sports management sim, though much of it is also related to general independent game developing.

Video games are currently an exceptionally crowded market at the moment. There are tons of quality games out there, many of which will never get played or make a cent.

I’ll say this again over and over. If you’ve never written a game before, especially if you haven’t programmed before, don’t expect to make any money, and I mean not a single quid. I don’t mean unprofitable.

Therefore, you need to do two things if you want to make a game: value the time you’re spending on the game as an activity enjoyable unto itself, and only spend what you’re comfortable spending on making it. You don’t need great graphics to make a good game, and a lot of the times with sports management games good graphics can actually be a hindrance. The market leaders – I consider these Football Manager and Out of the Park Baseball – have sleek GUIs and facial graphics and 3D games, but the graphics in many ways are very simple and not entirely necessary. For instance, I loved FM2006, which had only a 2D engine. And I’m not sure you can call Front Office Football’s graphics sleek and it’s had many different iterations!

The Discord question revolved around whether a developer should program for Android or PC. There’s a correct answer to that in my mind. Unless you are specifically performing market analysis for a new game, program a game using something you’re comfortable using. There’s nothing wrong with even releasing a game that runs in the Python console – you probably won’t be able to sell it, and it may not be distributed very widely, but if you enjoy playing it, that’s what counts. One of my favourite things I’ve ever programmed – a soccer simulation with little to no user input that can simulate 1,000 seasons very quickly – runs in Python with no GUI.

If you’ve never programmed before, there are dozens of options. I like BlitzMax NG for PC, but the learning curve there’s probably higher than something like Unity or GameMaker, both of which can churn out good games very quickly.

If you’re just learning to program, there’s nothing wrong with getting the basics down by trial and error. That being said, it certainly helps to plan out what you want to do in your game. Keep the features as simple as possible to start. You might have an intricate game designed in your mind, but focus on the core features! If you build incrementally you’ll have a game that can be released early that works, even if it’s not as fun as you’d like it to be. For instance, in Australian Football Coach, I really want to add league expansion/contraction, but it’s not important to getting the game out of early access, so I haven’t worked on it much.

I’ve found thinking in terms of screens to be helpful as well. Think of your favourite games – they all have different screens, a match screen, a tactics screen, a team information screen. If you map out what screens you’ll think you’ll need at the start of the game, that provides you a useful “to-do” list and will make navigation easier for the user as well. AFC2020 uses one screen, but a bunch of different panels that are made visible/invisible as needed.

I spend probably 2/3rds of my time building the user interface. It’s painful. Don’t underestimate the amount of time it takes to build out a good frontend, especially if you’re more interested in the backend. The original Australian Football Coach used linear regressions, calculated in-game, to determine player salary modeling. The user never knew it, since the GUI was clunky. If you’re programming for yourself and hate GUI programming, I highly recommend building out a console game in Python. They’re quick and easy to develop. Python’s also great for writing quick models for your game simulator.

A piece of advice I received a long time ago was to look to board games, especially sports board games. Board games have to distil a sport down to something very simple while still being fun. If you’re having difficulty figuring out the actual simulation, look to see how board games which simulate the sport you’re interested in play out. You don’t need to copy them precisely, but they should give you a good starting point.

Your first priority should be to make a good game, but if you find that you’re creating something that’s fun, maybe you’ve sent it to a few people and they like it, don’t be afraid to set up a company for your game. This is a good idea even if you’re a “hobbyist” game developer. In the US, you can set up a LLC very easily by filling out a few forms – it varies by state but is around $100/year. You can then set up a bank account for the company. This is especially useful if you have multiple partners or owners, or product investors. You’ll have to wrap your mind around sales taxes unless you sell directly through Steam. It also has the added benefit of giving you a layer of protection in the worst case scenario that you get embroiled in a lawsuit, which should hopefully be rare.

Even if you don’t start a company, don’t be afraid to spend a few dollars on the game if you want to put it out there for a price. For PC games, $100 is the Steam fee, and you get that fee back once you make $1,000 (and you may not make $1,000). Steam does take a cut of the game’s revenue as well, but it makes a number of things much easier for you and is worth it. For Australian Football Coach, I paid for some graphic design, for someone to work on the game’s database, for an advertising spot, and for web hosting/a domain. All of these expenses added up to around US$1,000, and not all of them were strictly necessary, but all of them directly improved the game.

That being said, even with an extremely niche product – currently there are no other Aussie Rules games updated for the 2020 season, with one possible exception that’s really just a free update of a 20-year-old game – the game’s income hasn’t justified the labour cost. The biggest financial benefit to the game came as a happy accident. I released AFC2020 in March 2020. Because of COVID-19, I had just lost a contract I was about to start. Fortunately, the game sold well enough in that month to cover most of what I would have made on the contract.

However, it has not been a good investment in terms of time spent, if you consider money to be the only important factor. I’m glad I spent the time making AFC (over seven years in total now), I’m glad others enjoy the game, and I’m happy I can pay expenses and have a bit left over, but I am nowhere close to being able to do this full time. If you want to write a game like this, you might feel like you have to or need to – run with it, the process can be very satisfying.

Don’t forget product support. Every person you interact with has given you money for something you’ve made. This can take up a significant amount of time and you can run into the same problems over and over again. It’s still important with a freeware game, but I’m less likely to be upset about something free not working than something I’ve paid for. Be prepared for it.

In terms of alternate funding sources, I’ve seen a couple Kickstarters for sports management games. I’ve never used one myself, but I typically find Kickstarters to be most useful for games that have been mostly developed or prototyped and the game’s designer needs money up front to pay for a specific aspect of release, or for when experienced game designers gauge interest in a new game (Spiderweb Software comes to mind.) I will not support a Kickstarter for a game where not a single line of code has been written unless I absolutely trust the developer to produce the game, and I think others are wary of that as well.

Porting to different systems – such as Mac or Linux for PC games, or Android/Apple – can be tricky. If you’re starting out, I wouldn’t worry too much about this at all. If there’s a game in your head, take the path of least resistance to getting it out of your head and into code form. If it only works on Android or Windows or Mac, that’s fine, especially if you haven’t written a game before.

Many platforms allow for easy cross-compiling, now, though. If you are looking for good cross-platform coding engines, I can recommend both Cerberus X or BlitzMax NG, which are open-source, or Unity, which is closed-source (and which everyone seems to be using nowadays.) If you were to develop commercially for only one platform, my list would be Windows, with iOS/Apple mobile a distant second and Android a close third to Apple.

I’ll say it again: path of least resistance. Make the best game you can first.

If you want people to play your game, you have to market. If you’re writing for PC, a good target would be to get Steam to refund the $100 fee. At my price point, this threshold wasn’t quite 100 copies sold, a threshold which fortunately came rather quickly. You could also avoid Steam completely and self-publish, or publish on itch.io, which makes sense if you’re not looking at big sales platforms.

Most people will buy your game within a month of release. There’s a definite tail to game sales. If you’re going the Steam route, you’ll want to announce your game in advance. Steam players will wishlist games that aren’t out yet. Expect sales in your first week or so to be half of the number of people that have wishlisted your game. That rule is likely a maximum which reflects people who have wishlisted your game organically. It should not be an incentive to get you to get people to wishlist the game for the sake of wishlisting the game, since those users won’t buy it when it comes out! You’ll need to produce marketing products that make people want to wishlist the game, not try to pad your wishlist numbers – the wishlist should reflect the engagement your users have with the game. I consider Australian Football Coach’s wishlist similar to a marketing email list – you would purchase the game, maybe you will buy when it comes out, maybe you will buy when it goes on sale, but your target is people who want to be on that email list.

You’ll also want to promote your product through any free mechanism possible. Set up Facebook, Twitter, and Discord if you’re serious about making money. I think a Discord is fine if you’re looking to do this as a hobby. Chris at GMGames.org has been fantastic in terms of developing a list of available sports management games on his website. Write blog posts. Put up gameplay videos on YouTube.

The other rule of marketing that I’ve found for low budget games – the more you do, the more you sell, the more you engage people. There was a month lull due to COVID because footy matches weren’t being played, and I lost some interest in the game (for a number of different reasons.) The game didn’t sell more than three copies on any single day in the entire month of May. When June arrived and sports picked back up, I did more marketing and released a Mac version and while sales didn’t go crazy, the engagement with customers definitely lifted sales.

Be prepared to sell zero copies of your game. With a sports title, you’re already releasing a product that’s niche enough, but I’ve found it’s better to prepare for disappointment and be happy than the other way around. Treat it like a hobby and go out and do your best – you’ll probably end up doing better than zero! If you make a good game, you’ve got a side hustle going. You can get a hit out of your first game, but in reality, it can take a long time.

If you’re considering writing a sports management game, there’s really been no better time to try. I look forward to seeing what you come up with! Make sure to check out Australian Football Coach 2020, and watch this space for a future post on the actual nuts and bolts of writing a simulation engine.