Custom Game - Review, Thoughts and Suggestions

[Cadieux39]

Hi everyone, posting a huge thread here I will try to break this down into sections:
Custom Game Review
Positives and negatives
Quality-of-life improvements / Suggestions
Photoshops of menu screen concepts

No clue if Jeff or anyone from the dev team will read this, I hope they do, even if nothing comes from it. So, let's start.


FHM7 Custom Game Review: If someone is here for a quick number score FHM7 Custom game mode is a 7 on 10. It is a very functional game mode, with a learning curve in regards to menus and familiarizing yourself with the different data presented to you. As a hockey management simulation game, FHM does a very good job. As a customizable experience FHM can be hit and miss. Overall, the basic customization and ability to create a fictional hockey world is easy to accomplish. If you're looking to really fine tune the experience, the custom game mode isn't quite there yet. Not compared to OOTP baseball.

The Positives: As I mentioned the game is easily customizable, you could in 10 minutes set up a totally fictional hockey game to play. You can also spend 3 hours fleshing out a hockey world detailing specific cities, team names, points systems, rules, for every league. Speaking of moding, adding your own artwork and logos isn't that difficult either, however it is time consuming. This time around in FHM7 you can have multiple leagues running at the same time, in previous versions the custom game limited you to one league, one farm system and the junior/ feeder league. There is a lot more flexibility to the game now. If you’re looking to add a and customize a little a standard NHL game this is also available.

The Negatives: A lot of this comes down to some specifics that a few rare players will want to get into. First off, as a seasoned OOTP player I still found FHM lacks a little information in the manual for how a custom game should be structured. The league quality # is a cool feature, but it would be good to know the depths of how it functions. If 1.0 is the NHL and 0.65 is junior hockey, then the junior players are created at 65% the skill of the NHL? But these players will also get up to that 1.0 skill level? How does this work in other leagues, if you make a 0.8 level professional league, and that league has a junior system of 0.6, are these players also able to get up to the 1.0 skill? Are they capped to 0.8? It's confusing for someone coming from the sabermetrics of OOTP. When it comes to junior leagues, is there an ideal number of junior teams needed to feed a pro league with farm leagues. I’ve read in some posts that 1:1 or 2:1 ratio for junior teams to pro teams is ideal, but this information should be in the manual as well. Next up, historical finances, despite being a checkmark in the Custom game setup menu, this doesn’t appear to take effect in the actual custom game. I know in the past this was just how custom games were set up. It's not a huge issue but I can see for some this is a deal breaker, to have players in the 1930s with million-dollar contracts it breaks the immersion. There are still no international tournaments in a custom game, this would be a nice feature eventually. You can't add a league to a custom game on the fly either, everything needs to be set up at the start.



Finally, this last point is something fairly interesting to look at. (Hoping a Dev has an answer for me) When creating a custom league depending on the region and nation that is selected, as you proceed, the game will generate cities and teams. These cities and teams effect the player nations available in the "Starting Draft Nationalities" and "Rookie Draft Nationalities". This means if only American cities are generated the nationalities options are ONLY Usa and other hockey nations. This can be an issue and frustrating if you're building an American league but want Canadian players, or for example in Europe if the game doesn't automatically generate a city from a nation you want players to come from. I discovered this when using the USSR region in a custom game. As the game generated a league with teams in Russia, Belarus, Kazakstan those nations were available to generate players, but Ukraine was missing. I backed up and did the process again, this time Belarus was not there but Georgia was and Ukraine as well. I repeated the process a handful of times, each time the game shuffling cities in the league, which in turn shuffled the available players for the "Draft Nationalities". If the user goes and changes a nationality of a city or adds new city and nation, it will not update the "Draft Nationalities" option. I.E. even if I went and added Kiev Ukraine as a city in my league, Ukrainian players were not added to the list of nations for players. Which forced me to shuffle back and forth to get the nations I wanted from the former USSR region.

This leads me into the last section of this post.




Quality of life Improvements / Suggestions: I will number these and break them down, hopefully making it easier for someone to reply or reference them.



1. As I just finished writing about, Player Nationalities. It would be nice to have the "Starting/Rookies Draft Nationalities" update or reflect the nationalities of cities in the league. If a user adds a city and nationality to their custom league, that should also add that nationality to the creation settings. In an ideal world I would love to see this mirror what OOTP has for player creation. Where every nation is available to choose. If that’s not possible it would be nice to at least have a setting in which the top 8 or 10 nations in the hockey world is available for the "Draft Nationalities" settings. Regardless of the leagues home nation and region.


2. Make player nationalities modifiable, either at the end of the year on July 1st or just at any point in the league's settings and rules. This would allow users to change the influx of players as they progress in their game. Personally, I would like to start a game with only Canadians or Americans and gradually add players from the rest of the world as the years pass.


3. While on the topic of Player Nationalities. Not having the major league override the Player nationality settings of the other leagues its affiliated to. This would allow a user to create their own regional junior leagues that all feed into their Major league. OOTP does this where the feeder league settings are what dictates the future players generated by the game.


4. Listing the leagues the user has created in the Custom game menus. It is quite possible that someone has or wants to make an elaborate custom game, it would be pretty nice on the screen where the user can either begin the game or add another fictional league, to display (just by name) the other leagues the user has already created. As a visual reminder of what they have created and how those leagues are affiliated.


5. Import Logo / Jersey Button. For the teams customization tab, where a user can change the colours and information of the team. It would be nice to have a few buttons which would allow the user to quickly link/import artwork for jersey and logos. Similar to what OOTP has where the user can load and link logos and jerseys, as opposed to replacing game files and ensuring the naming is 100% correct for it to replace and work.


6. Show all players. Under the league menu have a page that lists all players from that league. (Feature OOTP has) Maybe this does exist but I can figure out where to see a sortable list of all players within a league. In OOTP baseball I this helpful to view and sort players. Either to look at stats, nationalities, ages, weight, certain skills.


7. Improved teams Home page, I understand everyone plays these games differently, coming from OOTP I'm so engrained to play the game from the teams Home page. The FHM equivalent is hidden within the INFO tab, in OOTP this is one of the main tabs on the top bar. I will provide an example of how I would love to see this page used and featured. I imagine most players possibly us the Managers Home Page as their predominant place for information, for me I've always preferred the Teams Home Page.


8. Owner/Franchise mode, honestly not sure what to call this mode. But essentially, I'm thinking of a mode where the user would still need to hire a GM and hire a Coach, but would retain full control of the lines and every day operations of the team as if they were the GM and Coach. The way I see it, the stats of the staff hired by the user would be the values that effect the in-game simulation. It's possible those GM/Coaching stats doesn't influence things that much and this would be a wasted or useless feature.


9. Consistent display for player rating, I find it distracting that there is a Numeric display, a Stars display, and the Stats Circle display depending on the menus the user is viewing. I understand there is a challenge on how to display these based on the menu, but I find it would be better esthetically to choose one method and make it universal across menus and pages.


10. Historical Finances, as mentioned in the mini review this function still doesn’t appear to be 100% working with custom games. This may be something more difficult to implement but it would be cool to have. Certain adds to the immersion of the game.


**These last three QOL changes may be down to my own incompetence in the game**

11. Protected players in free agency, in my custom game I turned off the RFA rule. I'm noticing in a few different places that list Free Agents that protected players without contracts are displayed. I think you can filter them out, I find it odd that protected players appear in some FA lists in the first place. Maybe have the protected players names in a red font no matter where they appear. Just to help visually distinguish them as players who aren't actually available to the user to sign.


12. Shop player option, i'm pretty sure i had spotted in a Post Jeff mentioned that this is something in the works, to make the feature more like OOTP, which lists out all available players suitable for a trade. So I think this is coming but i still wanted to list it as something that improves quality.


13. Last thing, it may just be me, I find the UI still difficult to digest, I am confused by the purpose of the Lineups tab. Lines makes sense, Depth charts makes sense, but lineups to me feels like a mix of the two. I do wonder if there’s a way to be more efficient with the Lines/Lineup/Depth Chart menus. There is probably a logical reason for this.



The photoshops and explanations are in the follow posts to continue the discussion.

If anyone from the forum or dev team has read through this you guys are amazing! Thanks for your time, I really want this game to continue and grow!

[Cadieux39]

I’ve decided to mash this together as an example for the Lines tab. I find what is currently presented a little difficult to read, my eye jumps to the gray bar which is the players roll more than the player himself. To see if there is a way to minimize the tabs and pages, I tried to present a display that would have everything on one page.

The current UI is pretty dark and packed in tight, I thought it would look cool if the game could display player jerseys (or facegens, but personally I think jersey works better) on the lines page. By having a small jersey graphic with the numbers, it spreads things out and I find it helps to really display the roster. The Jersey numbers also help with the identification of the lines.

One thing I thought about is how to display these graphics for teams that do not have in game jerseys, or a custom team for example. For this I created examples you can see down as Powerplay and Penalty Kill. One version has a white jersey with two outline colours, these two colours are the Primary and Secondary team colours. If someone created a custom team that is gold and red, the outlines would be gold and red. The other example shown would be generic stripes, again based on the primary and secondary colour of the team. As for the numbers this example shows the WPG jets numbers, for unsilenced teams or custom teams regular black numbers could be used, or perhaps in the team settings the user could select a “style” I.e. of the 32 NHL teams. The inspiration for this comes from NHL 95 which I had on my PC.

Also seeing that the 2D game engine at the moment only displays player numbers, having the lines set up this way would reinforce that association between a player and his number.

A final note, in the example I created I've also added a small section to display a lines chemistry. No idea if the game functions in this way, but I think it would be a cool and nice visual to see a groups chemistry together, at the moment I know you can see a list of players where chemistry is affected by hovering the mouse over the player.

Forgot one last thing. As i mentioned in my long list, i would personally like to see more consistency of how player skill is displayed. So with that in mind i replaced some of the numbers showing the ability and replaced it with stars, which I find displays better at a quick glance.

[Cadieux39]

As I've mentioned in the above posts, I've played a LOT of OOTP baseball. This has built certain habits into me, one of them being the team home page. The majority of my time in OOTP is on this page, I get a quick look at stats, standing, roster, schedule, injuries, prospects all from this page. I sim to the next day and then click on the box score to be able to view my teams results from the day before.

Because of those habits, jumping into FHM I've found the menus difficult. I just never felt I could get what I wanted in regards to information. I didn’t have a go-to page. The managers home is okay, but also in OOTP I tend to not view that page much. I found under the Info Tab that there is a Home page. But this page seems under utilized.

I feel like a common issue with these types of game is how overwhelming the menus and pages are. I’ve felt that myself when I started playing OOTP, I felt overwhelmed when I tried to get into Football Manager 2020. Even as a player of OOTP I find there is a learning curve to the FHM menus.

I decided as you can see, to post what my ideal (or close to ideal) Team home page would look like. I’d prefer if this was the default home page that users got to when playing the game. The ability to see Standings, Schedule, Injuries, Stats, Prospects, Lineups, Affiliations. All in one spot. If I could cram more in there adding the waiver wire would be cool.

For news I find the game already pulls you to that menu if something urgent is pressing, plus we have the red indicator on the envelope if needed, tasks, player offers I find just aren't as important day to day stuff to look at. In the team home page how its currently laid out there is LOTS of space let for the teams affiliations which I find is pretty minor in its importance.

In my example, I display the even strength lineup, along with some player stats. This again shows off to the user which players he has currently rostered. Having an “edit lines” button up can direct the user quickly over to the line page if they want to modify things. (But even that button probably isn't needed.) Also, with this line up display, you could have basic information displayed under the player name. In my example skaters show their Games played, Goals, Assists. If there could be a way to change what is displayed in grey (from a drop-down option) it would be cool to display other information. Player role. Player Salary. Player fitness. Overall Stars rating. Giving the user the option to choose what information they find most important on the home page.

Also to point out, it would be cool on the left with the schedule the ability to either quick sim a game, and also look at the box score or details of the game from that section as well. So I made a small modification there.


Well that is everything, took me many hours of prep time and photoshop time to put this together. Hopefully this wasn't a huge waste of time haha.

Thoughts or comments on any of this? Would love some feedback and discussions.

[tward13]

I like your concept for the team home page. Perhaps have them as widgets with a few more options for those who want something a little different?

On the schedule (bottom left) I might want to see the past few games, with link to box score, then the next game with option to Sim, followed by the next few games.

I'm assuming for your third line you'll want stats instead of roles?

You have some room in the box with the farm teams, maybe list the top 3 players or prospects with their GP/G/A?

[Cadieux39]

In the team homepage concept, the gray bar under the player name is showing different type of stat possibilities. If this is even possible I would design it for the information displayed to be consistent for all the players. I would prefer it to be something statistical. But it would be cool if we could chose the information displayed. My example was just to show possibilities of what can be displayed.

As for the box sizes, I imagine in terms of coding there must be a certain format to make it work. Which is why i tried to respect the space as it was divided up. The top right team affiliation box, is in fact split 50/50 from its original size. Which I imagine from a development point is easier to set up. Maybe that area can be split evenly 3 ways to add more information. Anyway that's just me explaining my thought process and trying to design something that could also work with how those areas are coded.