Vision and progress

The workflow will, more or less, be like most other sim/management games:

Load your campaign and view the leaderboard

There will be five divisions * 6 teams = 30 teams. Each division is sorted by wins (of course) so you can see who is leading each division. 6 teams in each division is nice cozy number. Each team plays 10 games in the season so you'll play your five opponents twice. Long enough to learn to hate your opponents.  >)

Review/edit rosters

Each team will have five players + reserves. There will be guards, forwards and centres and you need to look at player stats and put the right players into each role.

Guards are suppose to be fast but poor shooters. They're the one's that zip around the outside.

Forwards hussle around the key. They are all-rounders.

A single "centre" player dominates the basket. Tall and slow but can shoot, dunk and get rebounds.

Of course, you're the coach of your team and you can place any player in any role, but know that guards will try to do what guards should do and centres will do what centres should do etc. You can put a short guy in the centre role but that may not work out so well.

Click through to the "schedule"

The schedule has, no joke, 300 games per season.

Three

Hundred

Games.

Of course, you'll sim most of those - or even all of those, so those won't take more than a few seconds. Point is, plenty of room for an eventful season.

The season will show all games spread over 10 weeks

And, for a twist, your own 10 games are spread randomly throught that season. In some weeks you'll play once, or twice. Or none! You could, theoretically, play 10 games in the last week!! I'm not sure this is a good format but I'll give it a try.

You pick a game from the schedule and choose to sim it or watch it

Simming the game gives you an instant home/visitor score. This is how you'll get through 300 games.

When you watch a game, you're actually watching a replay, meaning you can watch it over and over again. And, because it's a replay of something that happened before, you can share that file with your mates and they can watch it as well, in their own time and own timezone!

Go back to the schedule and sim/watch the next game

Play or sim all the games through to the finals. Three. Hundred. Games. But really, you can sim the lot in about 10 seconds!

Season end and player draft

Not sure how to do this yet. Will most likely just be a reverse pick meaning worst teams get the best picks from a pool of random new players.

Promote or relegation

Winning your division moves you up to the next division. Losing your divsion means going down. I've chosen this format because:

- divisions with 6 teams is nice and cozy and you get 1 or more seasons to enjoy your hate your opponents

- the relegation/promotion mechanism automatically groups teams of same skill level

- provides a sense of progression. You'll need to play at least five seasons to become the best of the best

That's the crux of the workflow. I'll discuss how you play with your mates in the next article and I've added a random screenshot. Everything is new and everything is placeholder so be nice!  :)