Gridiron Solitaire #103: The New Offseason
Much to my surprise, the rewrite of the offseason took three days instead of a week or more.There are eight team styles, as I mentioned last week, and a reasonably versatile evaluation system to decide whether a team needs to replace its coach. Plus, expectations rise the longer a coach stays with the same team, much as they do in real life.
All in all, I feel very fortunate that it went both quickly and smoothly.
Roughly, about 3 coaches a year (on average) will be replaced. Because it's a dynamic system, though, some years it will be one coach (or zero), and others it might be five.
Here's a bonus. I realized while I was working on the AI that it was well and good to make it better, but how was a user going to know about team styles and the dynamic nature of the league unless I told him? So I took the news ticker concept and added it to the offseason screen. Here, have a look:
I only have four variations of the message right now, but I'll be able to add more over time, and it lets the user know about coaching/team style changes. The news ticker changes the message every five seconds until the queue is empty, at which point the news ticker hides. Plus, if the user just wants to skip the news, they can click "Advance to Human G.M." and they'll exit the screen.
That was the last major feature revision for 1.3. Moving on to bug fixing/balancing/testing.
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