Developer's Notes 6.29.26

Play to Clinch Tennis

Started a separate playtesting blog so I could test another one of the ATproto blogging tools, and to keep this free of actual game/sport/match results. That said, before I get going, the worst part of playing your own game is like hosting a party and noticing all of the messy things in your house. Except in this case, nobody is coming over, so I can preen and nitpick all of the stuff you want to fix.

Cleaned up some of the conferences

In my usual pro sims, I move up a bunch of schools for D3 to D1 for the heck of it. In this case, it was a bunch of D1 hockey schools but when I carved out a separate D3/D4, it stopped making sense for those schools to be in D1 just getting by when I could make them dominant programs at the D4 level. So I sent both the UAA schools and hockey D1s that I brought up back down. It freed up two at-large bids too sending D1 from 34 to 32 conferences (for a 96-team tournament.)

i also wanted to make sure every state generated players and had at least 1 university playing tennis. I already broadened the scope by adding tennis to any program that has NCAA athletics, brought up some NAIA schools, and in some cases, moved colleges from their original locations to fill out geography in other states.

Fixing US talent distributions

I wanted to make sure every state churned out prospects, but wanted states with more instances of talent to be more common in the sim since geography plays a part in recruiting and where players go -- though it's not a huge factor -- so now the top tennis producing states, CA, FL, NJ, et. al. should have more players in the pool.

I also fixed the game's geographic weights when first starting a save to broaden the international flavor of the game.

Now I can playtest?

These changes are meaningful enough that it'll make actual playtesting not just simmng and seeing what happens work a little better for me. What I'm looking for is how team building works across seasons, seeing how the season flow works and eventually testing the pro league experience that's built into the tool but that I've never gotten to really use.

What's next?

Probably a Davis/Hopman Cup style tournament for players since those are team events and we have enough international talent in the game that it'd be interesting to see how they'd match up and it fits the dual-meet style formula well.

The only real question for the game is when you'd stage those matches, probably after the NCAA season and you'd need to be able to figure out how to persist the players who need to participate in that event -- and the pros -- while getting rid of everyone else after they retire if I don't save their profile.