Fighting Eleven #15: Interests
After a protracted struggle, the recruit engine is generating accurate recruits in terms of name, height, weight, and hometown/state across all positions and star ratings.That sounds trivial. It wasn't.
I still have some cleanup to do, as well as locating the recruits on a map (which I'm going to wait on until Fredrik sends me a map), but the next step is to generate recruit interests.
It's been a while since we've discussed this, but all schools have a set of recruiting "badges" (cards) that are reflective of the state of their program (which is ranked in almost a dozen categories).
Here's a working list of badge types (very subject to change):
Academics
Scholarship
Playing time
Facilities
Coaching
Ranking
Fan support
Tradition
Stadium
Location
School size (big/mid/small)
Legacy (family previously went to school)
Team style (pass, run, balanced, defense)
Recruits are going to have an interest cluster that will attract them to a particular set of schools. Those clusters will consist of 3 badge types. Here's a preliminary list:
The Bookworm (academics, scholarship)
Going Pro (facilities, coaching, ranking)
The College Experience (tradition, fan support, stadium)
BMOC (fan support, playing time)
The Underdog (playing time, coaching)
The Randomizer (everything rolled at random)
Playing it Safe (location, school size (small), playing time)
The Historian (legacy)
I need more of those, and ideally, each one would be related to three badges.
Here's how this will work (again, subject to revision):
--dice roll to identify the recruit cluster
--roll for one of the three badges in that cluster. That becomes one of four interests.
--roll for the second interest. If there's a 10% chance for each remaining badge, then the other two badges from the cluster would have a 15% chance each (or even 20% chance each) of being rolled. So it's not a slam dunk for the other interests in the cluster, but it's a significantly elevated chance.
--roll for the third interest. Any remaining badges from the cluster have an elevated chance of being rolled.
--roll for the fourth ("secret") interest, using the same procedure as the third.
Once those interests are rolled, the user will see the top three, but the secret interest remains hidden until someone plays the matching badge.
Every recruit will have four interests, but the weighting will be different for each recruit.
If a player has all three badges in a cluster, and the user (or A.I.) plays the badge that completes the cluster, they'll get bonus points in the recruiting battle (plus a nice visual and sound effect).
If you have any ideas for badges or clusters, please let me know. Everything helps. Oh, and if you're wondering about "BMOC", that's "Big Man on Campus".
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