Australian Football Coach News

Thank you for your purchase of Australian Football Coach and your support throughout the years.

As a thank you, if you have already purchased the game, Australian Football Coach 2020 should be gifted to your Steam library at no additional charge. You were promised any future updates when you bought the game, and AFC2020 is a complete update with heaps of new features. You'll get all updates to AFC2020 as well.

(If any future versions are released - let's call it AFC3 to start - you'll have to buy them.)

There will be no more updates to this game. If you haven't purchased this game, we strongly recommend purchasing AFC2020 instead.

Thank you again and hope you enjoy AFC2020!

The early access version of Australian Football Coach 2020 will be released on 14 March 2020 (13 March U.S./Steam server time)!

If you already own Australian Football Coach, you will receive AFC2020 at no additional cost. If not, AFC2020 will be available here, so add it to your Steam watchlist: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1077630/Australian_Football_Coach_2020/

The new software features an entirely redesigned match engine and navigation system. The matches run more quickly while still generating 90% more events than the original version, and no screen is ever more than a couple clicks away, along with many more additional features!

Australian Football Coach 2019 is now coming soon on Steam! Any future development reports or announcements will take place there.

Please head over to the game's page and add it to your wish list: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1077630/Australian_Football_Coach_2019/

Once it's released, AFC2019 should automatically appear in your Steam Library if you already own the current version of Australian Football Coach (please note this has to be done through Steam, so it may not happen immediately.)

This isn't really the March development update anymore, but it's been put off so that work on the game can continue.

The most recent work's been pretty unglamorous, but a lot has been done. Unlike the last update, where systems like list management were put together well, most of the recent work has been making sure the match engine works properly along with doing front end design work to start to let the human coaches have some control over the game.

The match engine's the big thing at the moment. Once it's done, the game should be ready for alpha testing, but when it's done is still up in the air at this point. While some of the code has been reused from the previous version in other game components, the match engine's a complete rewrite. Because it's more precise than the current game engine, there's a lot of fine tuning to do. One of the suggested ways to simulate the game would be to estimate how many disposals, goals, et cetera each player should have and then create a match engine around that, but then you don't get to watch the action of all of the players running around on the field.

The problem with these sorts of simulations means one minor tweak can have a massive impact. For instance, in a recent version, the followers would bunch around the ball and handball back and forth to each other until one of them broke free, leading to zero marks over the course of the game. The underlying issue was that a player catching a handball was able to dispose of the handball immediately, so the player assigned to tackle the handballer would never get to them, and that handballs were weighted so highly a player never decided to kick to any other players. That hasn't been the only funny issue that's been debugged recently - for instance, a player continually decided to run out a kick-in even though they were well defended, leading to a tackle, turnover, and easy kick at goal for the opposition. The engine's being tested with "superhuman" or infallible footballers - every player on the pitch has their stats maxed out for testing, so it's not as if this fake computer player took one too many hits to the head.

There's a lot of things working nicely though, such as man-on-man defence.

One feature that has been worked on outside the match engine has been the human coaching module and getting everything set up for you to select your team. It's led to more funny issues - the very first time the game ran with a human coach, the selection screen hadn't been set up yet, so no players were selected for the team at all - the opposition faced a game where 18 men played against none, and whoever the ruck hit the ball to would run the ball into the goal without even attempting a pass. (The game wasn't simulated all the way through, but if this is anything to go by, the highest possible score in a game of Aussie Rules has to be somewhere in the low two-thousands.)

More to come in a couple weeks as work continues in earnest.

February 2019 has been a big month for AFC2019, the newest version currently under development, and it's ready enough to start showing off some of the new screenshots!

But first, quick news about the current version of the game: Version 0.19.11 has been pushed fixing an end-of-season 2019 bug. If the game continues to crash, please send your save game file so the crash can be isolated and a patch will be uploaded as quickly as possible.

Now onto the new stuff! Development this month has been focused around player movement - the drafts, free agency, trades, delistings, and zoning, so the first two screenshots will show what the AFC 2019 will have in store in terms of list management.

It's important to note the game's still currently in alpha, and hiring a graphic designer's on the to-do list. Clearly there's still a ways to go yet - the background image isn't even scaled to the proper resolution, there wasn't enough time before the arbitrary deadline of the end of the month! - but the basic layout has been completed and it's working really well! It's much easier to navigate than the current version, which admittedly can be a bit awkward at times. It's set up to handle multiple human coaches simultaneously, unlike the current version. You can also create your own skins if you choose to do so.

That being said if you want to help out with the graphic design please get in touch.

First up, the league player list! This displays every single player currently playing in the league and one of the most important new features: player status! Each player's status affects their expectations - Superstars and key players will be very unhappy to be left out of the squad. Competitive Aging Veterans who haven't won a flag yet may request a trade to a team with an open premiership window.



The "competitive" part as well should be noted. Each player has their own specific personality, including a couple holdovers from the current version - homesickness and greed - but also loyalty (which affects the likelihood of signing a new contract with the same team and general happiness), ambition (which affects how much winning or losing impacts a player's happiness, including their desire to sign with a winning team), and spotlight (could rename this one in the future, but players that want to be in the spotlight will sign with more prestigious teams.) A couple more attributes are planned as well.

Player morale has also been implemented, but it's not quite ready to show off here. Your team will have certain events happen over the course of the season which may affect morale in certain ways. More importantly, events will occur to every single team and the AI will be prepared to handle them in their own way as well. As has been noted in a previous development blog, there's actually no human interaction in the game world yet - it's very important from the design point of view to drop you directly into a robust game world, so everything you respond to the AI will have to consider in exactly the same way. While the current version tries to do this as well, it's programmed in a way where a lot of the AI occurs separately from the user - for instance, in the current version, there's separate code for when the AI proposes a trade to a human manager than for when an AI proposes a trade to a non-human manager. It seems minor, but has a huge impact on how the game's developed.

The child model has also been rewritten from scratch. Each player will produce up to a target number of children starting at a random age. Players will "get pregnant" regardless of gender, though female players will suffer a long-term "injury" sometime during the first trimester. Each child will have a certain interest in footy and a certain potential. At the age of 16, the child will decide if they want to embark on a footy career and either find themselves zoned in state or on a reserves team somewhere, or "vanish" into their actual real schoolwork/job. In the current version, children were only generated if a player played in over 100 matches in their career for father-son training.

Training will be rewritten from scratch as well, though it will look ultimately similar to the current version - instead of micromanaging a training plan, you'll be given the option of how hard you want to train your players by selecting different training types each day. Fatigue will also be completely redone - one neat thing about the fatigue model at the moment means teams which play in a different state than their home state lose a day for travel, which causes fatigue, based on the effects travel has on Perth players generally, which will be something for you to manage.

The most amount of work this month has been on list management, however. The AI now interacts much more intelligently to list creation. The list manager position has been created and each team has their own list manager with their own biases, including favoring youth or veterans, and favoring the draft to free agency (list managers can favor both youth and free agency, or veterans and the draft - for instance, the latter means they'll target veterans in free agency but also be more likely to trade players for draft picks.) Still to be done is getting the AI to sign intelligent contracts - unlike the current version, the framework is in place for you to offer different salaries in different contract years, so you can front-load or back-load a contract as needed, but it's not yet used. The trade code should be done by the end of the weekend.

If you're managing a state team, zoning has been completely implemented too. State leagues were awkwardly implemented in the current version, but the new version lets you top up your list with zoned players. Here's an example of Norwood's zoned player list in the South Australian league:



Not all leagues will have zones, either.

Some other touches have been implemented - for instance, note the 365-day calendar, and the developer's incessant need for North Melbourne to start the season 14-2 (this is a placeholder.) But there's been more little touches added too, including secondary stadiums and the traditional "stadium clashes" - no two games can be played in the same stadium on the same day, to name a few.

Looking forward to showing you the development as it continues into March!