I'm Building A Football Manager Game! [Part 1]

_{Image Source : DeepAi}

OK.. Here goes nothing.

Hi there! I'm Clint Aribs. Founder, Varanova. I want to build a football manager simulation web app.

First of all, I'm no programmer. I can't code to save my own life. I'm quite scrappy so, I found this cool no-code tool called Bubble that allows me to build pretty much whatever I want and I only realized how powerful it is when I started building with it. My first project was a digital bank, and after roughly a couple of months, I was thrilled with the results - Neoxend. I absolutely enjoyed the process and I gotta say, the learning curve left me stoked! It was so steep.

Now I want to improve my skills by pushing the boundaries of what I can build with Bubble. I just wanna go through this project knowing at least that I tried to do it! The stage is set, and it seems that everything is on my side. I started off by outlining all the features of this game. Here we go -

Home & FAQ

• Showcases the game's features and contains a list of frequently asked questions and their answers.

Onboarding

• User should be able to create an account with their email consisting of a unique username, manager name, and password.
• Next, user should create their team by inputting the team name, acronym and upload a custom png emblem. Users also have to name their stadium.

Dashboard

• A nice interface that gives the user the ability to oversee the affairs of their club. Stuff like Matches, Squad, Stadium, Training, Competitions, Transfers, Finance, Stats, Settings, etc, are all sections of the dashboard that comes to mind.

First Team

• User's club initially gets populated with enough players so they have 'something' to manage, you know, 'somewhere' to start from.

Squad Management

• Users can choose their line-ups, formation, and tactics from here.
• Player contracts can also be managed here.
• Youth academy can also managed here.

Transfer Market

• User can buy and sell players on the transfer market. I'm thinking of some kinda countdown timer for the transfer market, for obvious reasons. Transfer market isn't always open.
• User can see and even filter market by player's position, value, overall player rating, career stats, season stats, abilities, etc.

Game Economics

• User has three balances (Salary Budget, Transfer Budget, Soccernova Token).
• User's club earns money to their budgets from sponsors and match ticket sales.
• User can set their own ticket prices. Careful! - Higher prices, lower turn up.
• Match ticket revenue = ticket prices * club fan count OR stadium capacity (whichever is lower).
• Users can lend money to other user's clubs and earn interest.
• User can partake in matches and competitions and win more money to their club budgets.
• Still brainstorming (Lemme know what I'm missing).

Training

• User can select particular positions and skill regime to train their squad for.

Matches

• User can simulate exhibition matches or competitions in single or multiplayer mode.
• A typical match in this game would go something like this - The match begins and the user can see the score-line and read the timestamp description of events happening in the match from the first minute (1') to the ninetieth ('90). A minute in a match passes every second in real time. At the end, user can see some key stats like possession, shots (shots on target), passes (pass completion), corners, yellow cards, red cards, etc.
• In single exhibition, user can simply choose an opponent and just hit play to start the match.
• In single competition, user can choose a competition type to partake in. League or Cup.
• In multiplayer exhibition, user can create an exhibition match request or accept requests from other users in order to start a match.
• Now, when it comes to multiplayer competition, I'm still unsure how to pull it off and make it as inclusive as possible. How do users qualify to be a part of a multiplayer competition? Should I just create a few competitions and have players compete and try to rank high enough to qualify? Or should I make it quite like Hive Blog where users can create their own communities, so like users can 'Create A Competition'?

Competitions

• A League competition would consist of 20 teams each playing all else twice (home & away). Top of the table at the end wins the league title and prize. There will be promotions and relegations.
  A win = 3 points, a draw = 1 point, a loss = 0 points. 38 matchdays.
• A Cup competition would consist of 32 or 64 teams competing for glory in a knock-out style to a final. winner gets a prize. runner-up match also will decide 2nd and 3rd places.

Stadium

• User can upgrade their stadium to have higher capacity. Higher capacity means potential for higher match ticket revenue as fan base grows.

Finance

• User can manage their Transfer & Salary Budgets, negotiate better sponsor deals, etc.

Statistics

• User can see detailed stats like overall manager career stats & season's stats, player stats, league stats, cup stats, etc.

Chat Rooms

• User can create or join relevant chat rooms and chat with other users on the platform, nurture communities and such.

Settings

• User can change their club's name, stadium name, emblem, change password, etc from here.

Wallet

• Users can buy game Soccernova tokens from here. Soccernova tokens are used to create or join competitions, play paid exhibition matches, purchase additional funds to club budgets, etc. In paid competitions, user can earn this token for winning competition. Token can be withdrawn. Withdrawal method could be Hive Token - lol! I like where this is going... hehe.

Wheew! OK. That's a lot to do. So to get started, I had to come up with a name for this child of mine. So, I asked ChatGPT.

I got some cool name ideas from ChatGPT and in the end I settled for a name I came up with. Nova means NEW in many languages I guess, and it is a soccer game so... SOCCERNOVA (New Soccer) Let's go!

Next, I had to design a logo for this bad boy. So I headed on over to Canva and worked my magic.

Sweet! I like it. Next, I had to design a background image for the hero section of the home page.

Now Let's go to Bubble.io and build this thing. When I got to Bubble I was greeted with a blank page as usual, and I remember how intimidating it feels to start with a blank page. I decided to search for other football manager websites for design inspiration. I found BeManager.com, Elevenkings.com

Now, I got something to work with. After some designing, I ended up with this...

The Header and Hero Section is done. This is gonna be one heck of a build. The die is cast. You can follow up on the progress of this project here - Soccernova

In my next update, I'd be going into details about Bubble's development features (Design, Database, Workflow) and how I plan on using them to flesh out my ideas.