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Virtual Manager in 2017

Bubbles, FC Sunnyvale Developer 6 January 2017, 19:07

Earlier this week I wrote a little about three of the major projects we worked on in 2016. Today I'd like to look ahead at some of the projects we will be working with in the new year.

** Project Rebalance **

Project Rebalance needs to be completed and rolled out, as one of the first things we do in 2017.

If you have been following my series of blog post about Project Rebalance, you will know that we already have changes in place relating to potential distribution, training, and age-related decay of player attributes.

One of the things we still need to do is to perform a simulation of an entire player population, so we can get an overview of how the overall player composition will evolve over the next few years given the changes described in the previous blog post.

Another thing we need is to get an overview of the economy of clubs; especially with regards to the distribution of VIFA points, entrance fees and prize money.

There will be more about Project Rebalance in another blog post in January.

** Several clubs on the same account **

After Project Rebalance our next project will be the ability to have several clubs on the same account.

We know that many people often wish they could try what it's like to start again from scratch. But, you can't really do that today, since you might run afoul of the rule that states that you can only have one club. This rule exists only because there are certain forms of cheating, which is made possible by having several clubs.

If we implement an formal method for connecting several clubs on the same account, we can prevent cheating between them by a simple technical measure, and and therefore be able to legalise having a second club besides your old one.

** Mobile-friendly navigation **

It is no secret that Virtual Manager was designed from the outset to be a desktop game. Therefore, it can be a bit inconvenient moving around the site on mobile.

In a perfect world we would redesign all game pages and features to be 100% mobile friendly, but that's much too large of a task given the few resources we have.

Instead, we will just try to improve the navigation element - the menus at the top and left side. These elements are repeated on nearly every page of the game, so an improvement here could really give a boost to the mobile-friendliness of entire game without us spending an unreasonably long time on it. If we ensure that these menus automatically adapt to small screens, it'll be a bit more comfortable to move around Virtual Manager on mobile.

Afterwards, we might occasionally spend some time redesigning a few of the most frequently used functions and making them mobile friendly.

What else?

The 3 steps I have mentioned above will keep us busy in the beginning of 2017. I won't try to predict what we'll move onto afterwards, but we have a long list of exciting ideas, that we'd like to start working on as soon as we can.