Gamer's Paradise: Sports/Hracuv-raj-Sportovni-Hry.bin/Manager/NOTES.DOC

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                            DESIGNER'S NOTES
                              Andy Dolphin
                             September 1996
                             rev. July 1999


HISTORY

The idea for Coach came to me some years ago, when I was watching a pro
football game on TV.  I had an urge to play a computer football game on my
PC, but it seemed somehow unsatisfying.  What I REALLY wanted was to build
my own team, and coach them for years.  The computer games around really
only let you grab a joystick and run your little men around on the field,
which was fun of course, but not what I was looking for at that time.  Thus
was planted the seed for these games.

So I sat down at my computer and started writing.  Version 1.0 of Coach was
almost entirely written in a single evening, with only a few bookkeeping
routines that needed to be left for the following day.  Compared with the
amount of work that I have now put into Coach and its offspring games, that
was pretty impressive.

Of course the original version of Coach was not anything like the current
version.  The first thing to be improved was the user interface, which
forced you to go through your whole team every game and was prone to
crashing when you entered an incorrect choice.  The current look, with the
blue screen and the full-screen menus, is probably the oldest part of the
program that has survived reasonably intact.

Most of the major changes in the game have been on the GM side, only
recently have I made major improvements to the coaching aspects.  In Coach
1.0, the only way you could get a new player was to draft him.  So the
first large addition to Coach was to add trading.  Making the computer a
smart trader turned out to be one of the most challenging aspects of the
game, far more so than, say, coaching a team.  In fact I am still making
modifications to it occasionally.

The next addition was primitive economics.  Something to balance out the
game a bit.  The first economic rules had only player salaries, contract
lengths, and a salary cap.  Added at the same time was free agency (can you
imagine Coach without free agents now?).  Making the computer a smart
bidder has probably been the #2 challenge in the game, and that is also
being revised once in a while as well.

Very little changed in the game for a while, as I spent most of my effort
putting together the other five games of the series: Manager, Basket,
Hockey, College Coach, and College Basket.  At first the development of all
six games was basically independent, but when I ported everything over to
C/C++ I started using shared code, so that a change in one game will affect
all games that use the changed code.  This has made the series more
playable, as they basically all look the same.  The last game to get
converted to C was Hockey, which came out in 1996.

Most recently, there have been a large number of minor changes.  The one
major change has been finishing the economic rules.  Instead of merely
having a salary cap and a payroll, you now have a team-by-team budget based
on the amount of anticipated revenue and savings before the season.  The
coaching options of all the games have been largely overhauled frequently,
which was necessary with the economics.  The problem was that the
economics rules would tend to destabilize the game as the good teams could
afford a higher payroll.  So the redone coaching rules allow for a well-
coached team to make up some of the difference.

The College Manager game, written in 1997, was the first new game in three
years (the other college games came out in 1994), and was also the first of
my games to be written more for e-mail play than for play on a home
computer.  Finally, the first new sport simulation since 1993 was the
soccer game, completed in early 1999.  The soccer game was a change of pace
for a couple reasons.  First, it was the first game to make its premier as
an e-mail league (the home game didn't come out until after one full season
had been played by the e-mail league).  Second, it was the first game not
based on American sports.  The typical American division of the league in
half (east and west in basketball and hockey, for example) was done away
with in favor of a European system (all teams together, playing each other
team twice).  The cup matches also happen during the season, leaving the
"real" championship (the team with the best record) to be possibly decided
in the last game of the season.  It has also been enjoyable, as the online
sports leagues have attracted a much different group of people than the
American football/baseball/basketball crowd.


THE PRO GM

I will start with talking about the general manager options, largely
because they have been the most important part of the games throughout the
development.  The basic purpose of the GM functions in Coach (and the rest
of the pro games of course) is to allow you to build your team in whatever
ways are available to pro teams, and to make the game as playable as
possible.

One tough case to balance is the free agent signings before the draft.
Obviously the fairest way to run the whole thing would be to have every
team, one at a time, choose the player it wanted to bid on and run a set
of bids for that player.  Then continue this until either no free agents
were left, or more likely, no team wanted to make a bid.

Doing free agents in this manner would definitely be the fairest way of
running it, but did not work out in practice, since the person in front of
the computer would be wading through screen after screen of unwanted
players to bid on before getting his chance.  So out of that came the
current method of free agency, where all the human teams get to choose
players for bids first, and the computer teams sign right before the draft.


THE COLLEGE GM

This aspect of the college game was basically nonexistent for a few years.
All you did was decide what positions you wanted new players in, and your
roster was randomly filled with players of those positions.  So recruitment
was added to spice things up a bit.  But how precisely to do it was tough,
and the main reason I waited so long to do it.

In the "real world", recruiting of high schoolers is quite a complex
process.  For starters, all players have some sort of innate preference for
most of the schools.  It has to do with where a school is, what conference
they are in, where the kid grew up, where his folks went to school, how
good the school's football team is, and how long before he'd start, among
other considerations.  There's really nothing that can be changed about
that.  So what the recruiters try to do is either overcome this preference
or build on it.  The colleges, for their part, can show varying degrees of
interest in an athlete, from a mere letter to a visit to the school and
getting the pitch from the head coach.

In putting this in the college games, I didn't feel that making it that
complex would be very useful.  The basic recruiting scheme of having a pool
of athletes that the schools try to recruit was easy to come up with.  The
hard part was the mechanics.  I finally decided to not give the players any
preference up front, but instead to have them rank each team that was
interested in them on a basis of the school's ranking and the quality of
the conference.  To make it fair for human coaches, the conference only
matters for computer teams.  The remainder of a player's preference was put
in the form of a random number added to each team rating, and the player
would go to the school with the highest overall rating.

The other choice was how to quantify recruiting.  Here the choice was made
entirely along the lines of playability.  Since a football team can only
have 50 players max, why not allow them to recruit the number of players
needed to fill the roster?


OWNERSHIP

The aspect of "owner" of a team is quite new in the games.  It used to be
that the salary cap was the only thing preventing infinite payrolls.  The
game played OK that way, but was definitely lacking a dimension.  So the
full-scale economics rules were added, and later simplified for ease of
play.

They are definitely simpler than the real-life ownership.  There is only
one ticket price for the whole stadium, for example, and no luxury suites.
The TV revenue is a constant amount, no matter how good or bad your team is
or how large or small a market you are in.  In the way the rules ended up,
the TV revenue is basically a force to equalize the teams, and the gate
revenue is based on how good your team is.

Of primary importance, though, was forcing real-life considerations and
common sense to rule.  For starters, a winning team can afford a larger
payroll.  A team with a newer and larger stadium will bring in more money,
but only if you fill it.  A team that plays in an empty stadium loses much
of its home field advantage.  And if you start losing money, you need to
cut your payroll.

A lot of fuss was made over the economic rules in the email leagues when I
first introduced them.  The claim was that I had forever ruined any hope of
the worse teams rebuilding, as the better teams would have more money to
throw around.  Fortunately, that claim is completely false, as has been
demonstrated by plenty of capable coaches in the e-mail leagues.


COACHING

The rules on owners and general managers are basically the same for all
sports, especially in these games where I have generalized the rules for
my own sanity.  So making each sport simulation really "feel" like the
sport was quite a challenge.  The obvious feature of all sports is that you
decide who plays and who doesn't.  The real question is what to do next, to
give each game some character

In basketball there isn't really much I added.  The problem is that doing
detailed coaching, such as designing plays and such, would be beyond the
scope of the game.  Besides, plays in basketball are harder to work out
than those in football, and it would have likely turned a simple, elegant
game into a coaching nightmare for people who didn't want to spend too much
time.

So I basically left it at choosing your starters, giving the players
preferences when on the floor, and so on.  While I'm on the subject of
basketball, one of my favorite aspects is that there is very little
difference between the positions in the program.  Each is equally likely to
get a rebound, take a shot if open, or make a pass.  The only real
difference is that the guards inbound the ball and that the center tends to
be closest to the hoop on defense, then the forwards, then the guards.  All
other statistical differences come from who plays where and how you use
them.

Why this is important is that a coach or GM has a lot of flexibility in
building a team.  Do you want to build around passing the ball to a big guy
inside?  Or do you want to have a small forward or shooting guard take the
shots while your inside guys mainly do defense?  Ideally, you would like
every player at every position to be great shooters, passers, AND
rebounders.  But reality gets in the way, and one must choose what
character team you want.

The game of football revolves around offensive plays to a large degree.
The job of the offense is to get a play and formation sent from the coach
and try to execute it as well as possible.  Coach comes with many built-in
plays, and you can design up to 255 additional plays.  The plays are then
put into five playbooks for different situations (normal, short yardage,
long yardage, red zone, and goal line), and you can decide what plays are
available in each and how often they are to be used.

The defense has a basic formation that it uses, but its real job is to try
to handle whatever the offense sends at it.  So I chose to leave out
defensive strategies, and basically leave it at choosing starters, a
formation, and how much man or zone coverage to use, and how often to blitz.

Baseball is probably about the simplest sport around.  What makes designing
a baseball game so hard is the number of little details that usually won't
make a difference in one game (or in ten games for that matter), but will
give you a couple more wins in 162.  When writing the coaching routines for
Manager, I again chose to take a middle road between simplicity and detail.
So I left out choices like what pitch to throw when the count is 2-1 and
the bases are empty.  Instead, the basic choices are in there.  How much do
you want to bunt?  Hit and run?  Steal?  Pinch hit?  etc.  In fact, Manager
has far more preferences than any of the other games, so you really do get
to decide how your team will play.

As far as the lineups, Manager is far more complex than either Coach or
Basket, because you set your defense, batting order, and pinch hitters both
for playing RH pitchers and LH pitchers.

One of the "fun" aspects of baseball, though, is that there's not really
much you can do to help your team out.  In football, you can switch between
a rushing and passing attack or try a new formation.  In basketball, you
can change defense to double someone who's scoring too much.  But it's hard
to make a certain batter or pitcher perform better.  So this is why I have
put so many preferences and player options that you can tweak to get the
best performance out of your team.

Next is hockey.  On the surface, hockey was basically a port of much of the
basketball code with major revisions.  The game is, like basketball,
essentially passing until you can get a good shot or lose the puck.  But
below the surface, there are major differences.  The critical aspect to
coaching hockey is managing your lines well.  This is certainly an art and
not a science, similar to putting the perfect batting order together in
baseball.  There are many jobs that need to be done on the ice, and at
least one player must be capable of each of them.  The obvious things are
shooting, passing, checking, rebounds, and faceoffs.  Like in basketball,
in a perfect world every player could do everything.  But like in
basketball, this isn't a perfect world...

Finally is soccer, the "baby" of the family.  Like basketball, the soccer
game turned out to be a very flexible game, where you can assign your
players various tasks on offense.  The trick here is to come up with a
game plan that will make the best use of your players.  You can set how
hard you want to press attacks, how much defense you want to play, your
formations, and numerous other options.


INTERNET LEAGUES

If you have ever attempted to write artificial intelligence routines for
something other than chess or checkers, you probably quickly came to the
realization that it's quite difficult.  I think I have done a pretty good
job with the computer coaching and GMing, and it doesn't make stupid trades
with anything near the frequency of, say, FPS baseball '96.  Even so, a
good player can routinely beat up on the computer.  And beside, wouldn't it
be more fun to be playing against a real person?  So a few years back I
proposed starting an email league based on the Coach game.  That league has
been quite successful, and in fact there are leagues based on all seven of
my games.  And yes, it is much more fun beating up on teams belonging to
real people than it is playing the computer...

Really, though, league play is quite involved, and a much different
character than sitting in front of your PC and playing a season of Coach.
League newsletters have come up, the college leagues have coaches' polls,
and you get to deal with real people when making trades.

One side effect of the leagues is that the ability of the computer teams
has really been stretched to its limit.  The quality of a person's coaching
and GMing is much higher when there are only two games per week, and all
the stats are available on the WWW.


TO THE FUTURE

Where to from here?  This is always the question I ask myself after a major
update of some type.  And numerous times I have decided that the games had
arrived to their final state, only to add something new because of a comment
from someone or a brainstorm on my part.  So the final answer may be that
the games will never be "finished".  But I do believe that the period of
frequent major change is over, and that future upgrades, while not
insignificant, will not be major reworkings either.

One thing that has kept the games progressing to a better and better
product is feedback from users, who often have different ideas of what they
would like to see in a game, and often those are things I have never thought
about.  I do hope that will continue in the future, as this feedback is
responsible for nearly half of the major improvements in the games so far.

  Andy Dolphin
  email: [e-mail]
  www: http://www.dolphinsim.com/


copyright (c) 1996-1999 Andy Dolphin