Sideline Engineering

Storytelling about the sports and game design mechanics.

Built a tennis sim. Brought back the sports pages?

Developer Notes 6.13.26

Ron Bronson|June 14, 2026

Built a tennis sim. Brought back the sports pages?

Ron Bronson|June 14, 2026

I'm going to build a dual match tennis simulator

Having successfully managed to invent a football game off a reddit post, and a baseball-cricket-pesäpallo hybrid that's been in my head for years....the next and maybe last holy grail of game development in my head is building a college tennis simulator.

Ron Bronson|June 06, 2026

How I Fixed Baseball Sim Prospect Development Breaks

Scouting or understanding the talent of a player in a computer sim is really the point of the game when you get down to it. In most games, there's not a lot of mystery between who is good and who isn't. The ratings are splayed out in front of you. Because the engine knows who is good, there are lots of ways to gamify how the game hides it from itself, otherwise you're playing against a computer that can never lose.

Ron Bronson|June 01, 2026

Several weeks of (fake baseball) iteration

I realized that in codenaming this baseball/cricket/pesapallo hybrid "O27" that much like cricket, you could just have a more limited outs form of baseball. Historically, they didn't always use 4 balls/3 strikes/3 outs, there were lots of variations before the current format became most common. So I knew the game/sport needed a formal name and right now, I'm calling it Alternative Rules Baseball, with the recognition that it's kind of boring. The alternative was to do something like naming it after an insect or other animal, but nothing really came to mind immediately and also, it's baseball with weird rules so why not just call it what it is?

Ron Bronson|May 31, 2026

Updating Baseball's Operating System

Making O27 baseball even more...like baseball?

Ron Bronson|May 25, 2026

Another bad creation: O27 (or how I broke baseball)

What happens when you turn a 9-inning baseball game into a single inning with 27 outs?

Ron Bronson|May 03, 2026

Building a team chemistry model

Improving how teams work together in a text sim

Ron Bronson|April 30, 2026

Changelog for Oregontennis.org

This is the first year of actual tennis rankings results, we've never had them in the past. tennisreporting -- the official site of the OSAA for tennis recordkeeping -- does track wins and stats, but it's rankings are not very good and are ignored. A coaches poll in tennis like in other sports presupposes you've seen the other teams around the state, but tennis is pretty regional in a large state like ours, so it wouldn't work quite as well.

Ron Bronson|April 22, 2026