5 substitutions, new player profile pics and development plan

For a quite a while we've been spending a lot of time working on our infrastructure, but today I have a couple of new things added to the game. Also, in this post I'm going to tell you about what we have planned for the near future.

5 substitutions per match

Starting today it is now possible to perform up to 5 substitutions in each match.

New player profile pictures

In preparation for the mobile-friendly version of the site, we've created new player profile pictures in the style of the ones you know from the employees.

Instead of waiting for the mobile version, I felt we might as well put them to use right away, so they've been added to the game today.

The new profile pictures are made as younger versions of the employee profile pictures, so the players should be recognizable as they age and even when they become employees. Here is an example of the evolution of a player's appearance over the years:

The result is that 630 new player profile pictures have been added on top of the 630 employee photos we already had.

Improvements in the tactics editor

One of the next things we're going to get into is going to be tactics. Here we have 3 initiatives coming up:

1. "Play style" will be divided into detailed settings
2. Individual player instructions
3. Basic playback controls in the match viewer

Detailed settings

Back when we made the current match simulator and accompanying tactics editor, we lost some options when several of the old settings were turned into a kind of "package deals" under the "Play Style" setting.

I was never completely satisfied with that, and I have long wanted to remove "Play Style" and split it into several settings, which would give you better control of your team and at the same time be easier to explain the effects of.

For now, we plan to add the following new settings:

• Passing
  • Controls the distance range of the passes the player will attempt by setting the min and max distance in meters
• Solo racerun
  • Controls how large the threat from opponents must be before the player considers passing to a fellow player
• Focus
  • Controlling whether the players move towards the center or towards the wings
• Finishing
  • Controls the maximum difficulty of finishing kicks the player will attempt, determined by the positionings of the opponents standing between him and the goal
  • Controls how close to the goal the player must be before he will consider finishing

We may add or change settings as we dig deeper into the work.

Using the detailed settings will require VM Premium. Free users will still need to use "Play Style", which will act as presets instead. They will be able to see the effect of the selected Play Style by way of the detailed settings sliders moving, but they cannot edit those sliders directly.

Later on, we might add a feature that will allow you to save your detailed settings as your own play styles, so that you can quickly switch between them.

It is possible that more settings will be added or that the ones above will be changed when we delve into the work.

Individual instructions

The ability to give individual instructions to individual players was a feature in the old tactics editor that was not included in the new one. This was both because there weren't that many people using it, but also because it didn't make much sense after "Play Style" was introduced.

For those who love crafting highly detailed tactics, however, it has been a much-missed feature, and over the years we've often heard the wish to get it back.

This will obviously be a feature for the experts who like to analyze the opponent before each match and adapt their own tactics accordingly. You'll get better options to achieve this with individual instructions. If, for example, your opponent has a particularly strong left side, perhaps your players on that side would be better off staying well clear of them. This will also be a feature that you need to be careful with, because you could easily come up with a tactic where the players don't work together at all. So it's not a feature that'll give anyone automatic success.

In any case, it will certainly provide a tons of ways to tailor your tactics and add a lot of dynamism to the game. Individual instructions are going to require VM Pro since it is a bit of a niche feature and will be quite labor intensive to implement.

Playback controls in match viewer

With all these new tactics options on the way, it becomes even more important that you can actually see the effect of the settings you make. That has been difficult so far, since we only see highlights and because the match viewer only lets you view the entire match in one long stretch. If you miss a detail in the 89th minute, you'll have to watch the whole match all over again, and nobody wants that.

Therefore, we'll implement some basic playback controls in the match viewer: Play/Pause and a list of highlights that you can expand and jump to.

This will make it much easier for you to analyze the actions of the players and see what effect the many new tactics settings have when you try them out.

I hope that this will make more managers want to dive deeper into their tactics and try out different strategies and settings.

Development plan

In addition to the tactics improvements, we obviously also have the task of redesigning the site to be responsive (mobile friendly).

That is a huge task, and not one we can tackle in one fell swoop. Additionally, the pace of gameplay improvements have also been slow for some time, so the responsive redesign will be something we're going to work on concurrently.

This will be done by setting up a separate test server where redesigned pages will continuously replace the old ones, without us having to worry that it will look disjointed when we have a mixture of new and old pages.

Even though it's a test server, the responsive server will be connected to the same database as the main server - so if you choose to try out the game on the responsive server, you will still be playing the main game, just with a different appearance.

To give you a better sense of what we'll be working on, we have divided the work into a number of Milestones. Milestones will be continuously updated and added, and when there are major changes to the plan I will write about it here on the blog. There may also be a dedicated page in the future where you will be able to see the status of each task.

Below you can see the milestones we have planned so far. It is impossible to set fixed dates, but the plan should give a good sense of everything that is coming in the near future.

Milestone 1 (responsive):

• Setting up a test server for responsive.
• The technical skeleton with updated libraries, etc.
• Navigation
• The basic layout
• Color palette, typography
• Form elements, buttons, etc.
• A number of representative pages without too much complexity redesigned to be responsive. For example:
• The login page (not the front page)
• New matches since last login
• Clubhouse -> Overview
• League -> Table
• Club -> Overview
• Club -> Senior team/Youth team
• Player -> Overview

Milestone 2 (main server):

• Detailed tactics settings

Milestone 3:

• New bonus types related to the youth team in the sponsor system (main server)
• Tactics editor redesigned as responsive (responsive)

Milestone 4 (responsive):

• Some of the most visited pages converted to responsive, e.g.:
• Team -> Overview
• Training -> Overview
• Training -> training result
• Market -> All 3 search pages
• Market -> Buying -> Auctions
• Market -> Selling -> Auctions
• Player -> Place bid

Milestone 5:

• Individual instructions. This feature requires a lot of development of the user interface, so it will only be implemented on the responsive server, in order to avoid too much wasted work. (responsive)
• Possibly a quick hybrid navigation to improve mobile experience a bit on the old pages that haven't been redesigned at this point - for example just a menu that collapses on small screens, so that you get a bit more screen space. Since individual instructions will require you to use the responsive server, this change aims to make sure that the most basic things are in place, so that you can play on it on a daily basis without it being too clunky. (main server)

Milestone 6:

• Match viewer redesigned to be responsive (responsive)
• Play/pause and skip to highlight in match viewer (main + responsive)

Milestone 7 - ?

• To be determined later.

Provide your feedback here: Feedback: development plan