Quote:
Originally Posted by bk1020
Ben explained on the video how Jim has that somehow coded differently than anything else in the game?
As in they're so hidden that the only way to document them would be look each day and write them down.
Jim's brain doesn't work the same as yours or mine. Jim has always said he'd rather have done a baseball sim and that's his first love.
I used to think it was done just for flavor but I think it's "The Artist" if you will trying to tell us something.
There's all kind of nuggets in those quotes that give away hints to how Jim sees the game and perhaps how to apply that to FOF.
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It's always fascinating to read something like this. I'm just a sports gamer who, at times, has felt the need to create the game I wanted to play.
I don't think my brain works all that differently, but my hearing impairment definitely makes my general communication style very different. And is why sound is not part of my work.
Because of my hearing-related disorder, I've taken several classes in neuroscience in recent years. We all work very in a very similar fashion, but I think you have to go all the way back to Freud's model of ego, superego and id to understand how people differ. It's an over-simplified model (yet absolute genius for its time), but it's a good basic model. My disorder forces a higher reliance on superego, living within my own meanderings of thought.
As for FOF8 and the quotes. Yes, some of it is supposed to give you insight into the game. And some of it is supposed to distract you. I've created a set of football "characters" there, and some are actually unhelpful more often than not. It's supposed to be like the real football world in that sense.
I go back to Sid Meier's advice (not to me personally) about game design. A good game should allow you to immerse yourself into an entertaining world, with a set of simple, yet meaningful decisions you need to make that have a definite effect on your outcome.
Football, unfortunately, is so complex that it doesn't lend itself well to game design (baseball did, until launch angles became a thing). I have to make uncomfortable simplifications because running a football team is many, many full-time jobs with thousands of meaningful (and not simple at all) decisions to make. These characters hopefully give some sort of insight as to what I'm doing. But maybe they don't.
Ben is right that I coded the archive differently. I didn't want people creating a list on day one. If you want to see May 6th's advice, you have to start the program on May 6. If I had collected and made up 10,000 quotes, they wouldn't repeat annually. But even getting to 366 from the archive I was using for collecting them required a lot of creativity and time.
That piece, in its original form, was somewhat inspired by Marc Vaughan. I visited his studio in London way, way back (I want to say 2001, right after 9/11). Even back then, Football Manager was a huge hit and SI was a growing company. They even had interns. Marc told me that the first job interns had was to read every sports page they could and curate pieces of articles about games to help build a library of text that could be used to generate text within the game.
A wonderful idea. If you have the time or the interns. I have neither with FOF, so I quickly realized that a similar approach would be so limited as to become tiresome in FOF. Quotes that didn't really apply to a particular game, or some notable phrase that was exciting to read in a story the first time, but after that, would become hackneyed and annoying. It works when massive. Not at all when less than massive.
My favorite author as a teenager was Robert Heinlein. If you're familiar with him, perhaps his best work is The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. It's narrated by a character named Mannie (not that hard to figure out the allegory there) and focused a lot on his AI assistant, "Mike" - a riff on Sherlock Holmes and his brother Mycroft, if you're into the symbolism aspect. Mike is learning to tell jokes. Mannie explains to him the concept of "funny once" in that a big part of humor, and of gaming, I think, is that the surprise of something notable and interesting is something you can only experience once.
Long segue aside, there are things I would have loved to do with FOF that I didn't have the time or inclination to do. A curated library like Marc's. A player database like OOTP's. But I could come up with 366 quotes, even though that was a significant timesuck that no manager would ever allow if I worked for a "real" company.
For the most part, I can create the game I want even with some limitations (a tiny player database, one league format and set of scheduling algorithms). Some people accept those limitations, some don't. But the piece they cannot accept is graphical limitations. The GUI has to work. Customers will accept that AAAAA titles have animated everything and indie projects might not. But there's a base competency, and that base gets more complex over time.
Probably in the mid-'00s, FOF was suffering from its base UI not being modern enough. Then I compounded the problem by trying to create a different type of UI - one where you decided what you wanted where and when. But I didn't have the knowledge to allow you to preserve and select and organize what you wanted where and why. The "power" users of FOF can quickly get there anyway and accept the time it takes to set up, but for a new customer, it's "what the f are you thinking with this?" Which means my customer base hasn't grown as it should.
So I figured FOF8 was it and looked for new opportunities. I thought the OOTP merge was a perfect idea because they know the next step and sharing in football would be a win/win for us. Unfortunately, timing was not on our side. But I did learn a lot from my supposedly-wasted years working on that project. I was much more focused on UI and studying how OOTP had taken its steps. Ideas abound.
But the opportunity for a solo developer to do the solo thing on a project this large is long past, so when OOTP decided it no longer wanted FOF, nothing could be done with a half-finished game (function 90%, graphics 10%). Also based in the Qt library, which forces design decisions that limit something like FOF in ways I couldn't accept. So that code base was a dead end.
Point being. We all have the opportunity to reinvent ourselves. Who I am as a somewhat old person is nothing like who I was when I first started FOF. And what I've learned, most of all, is that it's dangerous to think of ourselves as finished products. To define ourselves. To use labels. To think those labels mean anything. We are products of time and brain and physical capacity and environment. Those are all variables, even environment, which we can change if necessary. The more you learn, the more you learn that there's always more to learn.