Hockey sim

[Caesium]

Hi everyone,

This is just a thread for me to think out loud, discuss, and take suggestions for a game I want to make.  This is still very much in the planning stages, I have nothing to show just yet.

The premise of the game is that you are a general manager for a hockey team, you are in charge of signing, trading, and drafting players to try and create the best team possible and win the championship.  I've been thinking of requiring each league in the game to be 30 teams, and then creating an 82 game schedule just like how the NHL does it.  Instead of making a complex scheduling algorithm I'll just make it so there is a game every day, so the regular season lasts 82 days and the playoffs last 28 days, making a season take about 4 months to play.  There would also be a free agency period and draft to tack onto that, but that's the rough idea. of how the pacing would work for the game.

There are a few other hockey sim games out there, like hockeyarena, but I haven't seen exactly what I have in my head, so I'll give a shot at making my own.  My main challenge will be developing a way to simulate a game realistically.  It seems like a huge and impossible task when I think about it, but I think if I find a general way to break everything up into smaller tasks I might be okay.

I want a fairly robust player attribute system much like NHL 09 or Eastside Hockey Manager.  Currently I've broken down the attributes into these categories:

Physical
------------
Acceleration
Agility
Speed
Stamina
Strength
Toughness

Mental
-----------
Aggression
Discipline
Anticipation
Creativity
Leadership
Teamwork

Technical
-----------
Checking
Deking
Faceoffs
Hitting
Getting Open
Passing
Positioning
Shooting
Stickhandling

Stats will be either out of 20 or out of 100, I haven't decided yet.  Right now I'm thinking of a challenge system, where an attacker and a defender each choose a skill to use and then make opposed rolls, kind of like how it works in the d20 system.

For example, a forward is trying to get around an attacker, and decides to use a dangle.  The defender decides to use a poke check.  The resulting challenge would be something like the attacker's Deking + Stickhandling + Agility vs the defender's Checking + Stickhandling + Anticipation, throw in a random roll for each and maybe a rock, paper, scissors modifier depending on what moves each player decides to use (Dangle > Poke Check, Body Check > Dangle, etc).  The moves a player will try will depend on their aggression, discipline, and creativity.  The game then basically breaks down into a series of challenges with some basic hockey strategy thrown in, I think it might be doable.

There are obviously other challenges, like player generation, how strategies effect challenges, scouting, and how to handle a draft.  I think the biggest challenge is the simulation of the game itself.

Any comments/suggestions/questions/floggings are welcome.  I've never made a PBBG before, but I've always wanted to.  I've always been reluctant because I can never come up with a good idea.

[Scion]

Knowing very little about sport sims the only comment i can add is that you need to be aware that there are probably a whole lot of potential players that will not want to micromanage their players/team so its probably good to ensure that there are defaults for all the settings and that the defaults give a reasonable performance. keep this in mind when your designing your game and you will keep your potential player base larger than if you force people to micro manage every aspect of their team.

[jannesiera]

Knowing very little about sport sims the only comment i can add is that you need to be aware that there are probably a whole lot of potential players that will not want to micromanage their players/team so its probably good to ensure that there are defaults for all the settings and that the defaults give a reasonable performance. keep this in mind when your designing your game and you will keep your potential player base larger than if you force people to micro manage every aspect of their team.

Perhaps that's true. But isn't it also true that many sports sims have macro managing, so that the micro managing would make it unique? So why waste your time for something that is not original and players can find elsewhere's ? I don't thinn player base will be such a problem with the plan he has. There will be, if decent carried out, many people who want to play that game I think.

Note I'm not very familliar with sport sims either.

[Caesium]

Knowing very little about sport sims the only comment i can add is that you need to be aware that there are probably a whole lot of potential players that will not want to micromanage their players/team so its probably good to ensure that there are defaults for all the settings and that the defaults give a reasonable performance. keep this in mind when your designing your game and you will keep your potential player base larger than if you force people to micro manage every aspect of their team.

I definitely get where you're coming from on this.  My goal is to limit the micro managing as much as possible.  hockeyarena is a game similar to what I want to do, but they go so far as making you manage expenses, purchases, advertising campaigns, etc.  I looked at most of that and just walked away very quickly.

My plan is to focus on what players you have and where they play.  When you have your team, you'll just set your lines and wait until the next day to review results. That would be the minimum level of interaction needed to play the game.  If you want to go beyond that, you can negotiate trades with other players or sign free agents.  This is a pretty basic thing when it comes to hockey, even casual fans make lineups for their favourite teams just to pass the time   If defaults are required here, I could have an "assistant coach" that could automatically try to create the best lineup possible from a group of players if they didn't want to manage it themselves.

I want drafting to be pretty involved, which is where I think the micro management thing might become a problem.  Scouting players to draft needs to be pretty smartly done.  I initially thought of making people select each player they want to scout, but if there are 700 options to choose from it just won't work.  I think going with a regional scouting system would be good, because then they could set it and forget it if they want to.  Defaults can be set as well, so even if a player forgets to manage that area they at least have something to go from.

Even if many things require management, I think the way things are broken up might help simplify it a little.  You can only sign players in the off season, the draft happens in the off season, during the season your only option is to trade players, and there will also be a trade deadline.  This means players aren't doing everything at once, and they should be able to focus on one thing at a time.

I'm not super familiar with sports sims either, but I hope to be after spending some time on this project