Developer Notes: 6.27.26
In my college team tennis sim, Play To Clinch, there's no actual way to take over a team I just sim in a god mode that lets me see how things play out. One of the things I worked on recently was the recruiting portal that both does the intake of new players, but also reallocates talent from one program to another.
Developer Notes 6.26.26 - Play To Clinch Tennis Sim
Made some QOL improvements to the post-season tournament, added to the data portal
Let's see how D4 college sports will look
For real ballknowers, NCAA Division 3 is a massively complex web of over 430 schools throughout the US. It's a far too large collection of liberal arts college, regional state universities, branch campuses of flagships, and everything in-between.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
The Chip Window
How to eliminate tanking from the NBA draft lottery, while raising the incentives to win.
More sims led to more changes
Lots of iteration this week as I got through some to-do items that had been on my list for a while. Others were nagging problems I saw from playtesting.
What the Delta Kickoff System Actually Is
Viperball has a strange way of handling kickoffs -- by eliminating them -- and some data on how the Delta system doesn't correlate to worse results for winning teams.