Status Update (March 24)

[JeffR]

Time for another update; a longer one this time since it's been a couple of weeks since the last one.

It's a little chaotic right now with the OOTP and iOOTP releases imminent; losing portions of the website and some other servers for a few days last weekend threw things off even more. However, things should improve soon: if everything goes smoothly with iOOTP on Sunday and Monday, Sebastian should be back on FHM full-time on Tuesday. The Mac version will be one of, if not the, first things he works on. Once he's had a chance to take a look at that, we should be able to figure out exactly how much time it's going to take and come up with a schedule that gets it out in a reasonable length of time while still allowing us to make progress with other things.

There'll be a data update on Wednesday as usual, but definitely no game update this week, barring the discovery of a really catastrophic problem. We've managed to clear out a lot of game-breaking stuff in the first two new versions, so it's time to start taking a little more time between them and addressing less immediate, but more time-consuming, changes. When we do update again, we'll try to avoid the confusion that occurred this time when people wound up with older versions of the setup file from their browser caches.

We're continuing to make good progress with the database; I'm comfortable with where we are right now and the overall rate of improvement. We actually may run into a situation soon where we have leagues that can be made playable but may have to wait until we can implement league selection during startup, otherwise we'll slow the game down too much with so many leagues running at once. That's fairly high on the priority list. The historical database continues slowly but surely, two new seasons a week seems to be a comfortable pace for me, and I can speed that up if necessary, which will get the database done with plenty of time to spare before release. There are still a lot of rough edges to historical gameplay, but in general it's moving in the right direction.

The in-game view isn't much to look at right now; Sebastian and I have discussed some changes to it that would make it a little more attractive and entertaining. Basically, an EHM-style 2D engine isn't going to be happening anytime in the forseeable future, so it seems a little misleading and frustrating to have the game view centered around that shot display screen that looks like a poor attempt at pseudo-2D. We want to do something that makes better use of the game's art and data to help you get a little more attached to your players and team, rather than having them just be a flag on the ice and lines in the game summary.

Player generation and early-career progress is something I'd like to see refined quite a bit in the coming weeks. It's working (in a crude way) at the moment, but it can be a lot better. That'll have an immediate impact on the playable junior leagues, of course, but it's also important to build up a believable history for the players you draft and sign when you're playing at higher levels.

New player naming still isn't fully implemented yet; I'm hoping we can take a couple of steps in the right direction this week, but it's looking like we may have to wait a while for the planned province/state-based ethnic naming system and temporarily use a nation-based one like OOTP (which, unfortunately, will lead to issues like the Quebec-born player pool having too many non-French names.)

The effects of changes in player valuation aren't quite as dramatic as I'd hoped, but it was still a step in the right direction. The most recent update dealt with the basic building blocks of how individual ratings are relevant to a player's overall value; the next step (and it's a big one) is adjusting how the needs of individual teams change the way they perceive that value.

In less encouraging news, we're starting to run into the exact problem we were hoping to avoid: making little hardcoded fixes to account for oddities and exceptions in the way rules (both on and off ice) work in individual leagues. That's driving us away from the modular approach we wanted to take, where customization is easy because the rules can be swapped in and out for a given league and will behave in a uniform way. And there's a stability cost as well: a lot of the frequent crashing you saw in the first couple of weeks post-release was attributable to quick-and-dirty fixes that accomplished one thing, but led to situations where something else broke in a very bad way.

So, there's going to have to get that situation under control, which, among other things, will mean holding off on implementing more league-specific rules. If a league requires that every team have at least three players in the lineup whose last name starts with M and were born in June, don't expect to see that happening in the game anytime soon.

Finally, as I think I've said before, we don't plan on doing any serious promotion until we're much closer to the September release; word of mouth is still bringing new customers in at a fairly steady pace but we're trying to avoid a situation where we get a flood of new users that don't understand the game is still in beta. That said, an opportunity has presented itself where we might be able to bring in more preorders from people who know it's a work in progress, and I plan on looking into it a little more in the next couple of weeks.

Thanks again to everyone who has preordered; keep the feedback coming. I'm not commenting on it quite as actively as I was a couple of weeks ago, but it's not going unread.

[Cryomaniac]

Originally Posted by JeffR

In less encouraging news, we're starting to run into the exact problem we were hoping to avoid: making little hardcoded fixes to account for oddities and exceptions in the way rules (both on and off ice) work in individual leagues. That's driving us away from the modular approach we wanted to take, where customization is easy because the rules can be swapped in and out for a given league and will behave in a uniform way. And there's a stability cost as well: a lot of the frequent crashing you saw in the first couple of weeks post-release was attributable to quick-and-dirty fixes that accomplished one thing, but led to situations where something else broke in a very bad way.

I hope this can be fixed, since hardcoded league rules are really not the way to go imho, especially with no fictional leagues in the game. Obviously i can imagine it's difficult to make everything customisable and still be stable with everything else, so if it has to be done then it has to be done. It would be disappointing though.

[Stinson]

Originally Posted by JeffR

That said, an opportunity has presented itself where we might be able to bring in more preorders from people who know it's a work in progress, and I plan on looking into it a little more in the next couple of weeks.

Steam Early Access, by any chance?

That would be excellent. And if Valve were to say no, I'm seriously going to smack them. Considering all the Greenlight garbage they've been accepting, there's no way they can claim FHM... or OOTP for that matter... isn't good enough.

[erikthered]

Thanks for the update. I can't wait for Mac-native beta to be released.

[geckon]

Originally Posted by Stinson

Steam Early Access, by any chance?

That would be excellent. And if Valve were to say no, I'm seriously going to smack them. Considering all the Greenlight garbage they've been accepting, there's no way they can claim FHM... or OOTP for that matter... isn't good enough.

I may disappoint you but it has been said that OOTP was on Greenlight but didn't go through...

[Stinson]

Originally Posted by geckon

I may disappoint you but it has been said that OOTP was on Greenlight but didn't go through...

I know. It was also previously submitted several times directly to Valve (before Greenlight was a thing), and was rejected.

That's what I'm getting at above. Valve may not have thought OOTP (and now FHM) was worthy in the past, but they've been letting some real garbage get through Greenlight, so it would seem they've opened their minds. Basically, if stuff like "McPixel" and "Surgeon Simulator 2013" is worthy of space on their servers, but they say FHM isn't, something is catastrophically wrong... and I will have to smack their face off of their face.

[BTerran]

Originally Posted by Stinson

I know. It was also previously submitted several times directly to Valve (before Greenlight was a thing), and was rejected.

That's what I'm getting at above. Valve may not have thought OOTP (and now FHM) was worthy in the past, but they've been letting some real garbage get through Greenlight, so it would seem they've opened their minds. Basically, if stuff like "McPixel" and "Surgeon Simulator 2013" is worthy of space on their servers, but they say FHM isn't, something is catastrophically wrong... and I will have to smack their face off of their face.

Unless I'm missing something, Surgeon Simulator 2013 is on Greenlight, but not actually sold on Steam. Getting a game on greenlight isn't an issue. As said before, OOTP (Steam Greenlight :: Out of the Park Baseball 13) is on Greenlight just like Surgeon Simulator, but that doesn't necessarily mean either game will actually be sold on Steam.

That said, maybe putting FHM on Greenlight will allow people to find the game that wouldn't have otherwise (although if I recall correctly, they already said that they will put FHM on Greenlight at some point, so it might just be that they don't want to do it yet).

[Stinson]

Originally Posted by BTerran

Unless I'm missing something, Surgeon Simulator 2013 is on Greenlight, but not actually sold on Steam.

It's not yet available, but it was Greenlit on February 26th:

Fifth Set of Titles Greenlit Today | Steam Community

As for FHM, I'm currently hoping they don't try to go through Greenlight as they originally planned. As we saw with OOTP, the average gamer sees these games as a "spreadsheet simulator", or even a joke, and will (unfairly) vote it down.

I think their best bet at this point is going directly to Valve again, now that they're apparently more lenient (see above discussion), and try to get FHM in under the new "Early Access" initiative.

[BTerran]

Originally Posted by Stinson

It's not yet available, but it was Greenlit on February 26th:

Fifth Set of Titles Greenlit Today | Steam Community

As for FHM, I'm currently hoping they don't try to go through Greenlight as they originally planned. As we saw with OOTP, the average gamer sees these games as a "spreadsheet simulator", or even a joke, and will (unfairly) vote it down.

I think their best bet at this point is going directly to Valve again, now that they're apparently more lenient (see above discussion), and try to get FHM in under the new "Early Access" initiative.

My mistake. Sorry about that.