There have been a myriad of new features and updates to College Football Coach: Career Edition on Android that I've put out over the past month and haven't blogged about. Just to recap the updates, here is a list and description of some of the major ones:
Show Potential Option
By high demand, the Potential option is back in the game. As a reminder, the potential in this version is not going to tell you the actual Potential rating, because I feel like that makes the game dumbed down a bit. What it will show you is a predicted overall score based on varying factors. This score is what the game, at the time, predicts the PEAK level that player can achieve is, which is based on full playing time, meeting some goals, and the coach/team ability/ratings. It's more than likely that no player will reach this potential, but some may eclipse it.
Even & Odd Team Count Conference Structure
This is an important update. It allows full customization for league structure now since the previous limitation of Even Teams only is now removed. There are some caveats though:
Conferences that are odd and have 15 or more teams in them (eg 15, 17, 19, etc) will have uneven conference schedules. There's no easy way around this right now given the 12 game college football schedules and making this work in an efficient manner at this time without more thinking and I'm a bit burnt out of thinking at the moment. :)
13-team conferences will have no OOC games. This is also due to the same reason above. My current method can add 2 OOC games to it but it would extend the reg season to 17 weeks, so you'd have a lot of bye weeks. Meh.
The big advantage is now you can create something like the Football Championship Series league and make it realistic as can be given the current game limitations.
Scheduling Logic
Scheduling logic continues to evolve. As you see now, BYE weeks may exist depending on the league structure. In addition, OOC games are scheduled and scattered depending on the structure. This, in turn, helps Independent conferences have good schedules and makes the game a bit more dynamic. I've also made a point to not have any regular season repeat schedules which sometimes became an issue before.
Dynamic/Advanced Conference Realignment Structure
BYE WEEKs are now in the game. There will be between 0 and 2 BYE weeks depending on what the league layout is. BYE WEEKs will be scattered randomly except independent teams, which will always fall at the end of the season. BYE weeks will heal players that are injured and do not count in the W-L total.
Dynamics of Realignment is now fully turned on. It's code that I have had hidden away for several months now, but never worked because of scheduling issues. Now that ODD team numbers can exist, I can enable it. This allows conferences to steal teams from other conferences to grow their empire. It'll let conferences kick out bad teams. It'll let independents get snatched up. All of this can occur without trading teams like before. Trading teams is still enabled though! The option for this is called Advanced Realignment. This is on by default if you have a league with odd-team count in a conference.
New Redshirt Rules
The NCAA recently eased off on Redshirt rules and now allow players to play up to 4 games without invalidating their redshirt status. The game now automatically will redshirt any player who still has eligibility left and played 4 or less games in a season.You still have the option to manually force a redshirt year to players at the beginning of the season.
UI Improvements
One of the more noticable changes is the updates to the Team Roster and Player Profile screens. The UI in general has been updated to have a new easier to view and use look. Many more screens and displays have been subtly tweaked as well.
Offensive Linemen Stats
For the first time, I've included some advanced metrics for OL players. This does not save year-to-year though, at least not until a major update. What it does do is show you how your team performs when a specific OL is in the game. It'll calculate how many yards rushing and passing were gained during each snap he was in the game. It'll also say how many sacks occurred during his snaps too. All of this is used to calculate the year's top OLs.
Updates to Game Engine
Various things have been tweaked, and tweaked, and re-tweaked, and adjusted and continually updated. These include basically everything but primarily the Prestige system, the predictions system, rankings, tie-breakers, and added more detail to stats such as taking numbers down to 2 decimal places. This helps with more intimate stat tracking and stat ranking.
Team Chemistry
This is something I've wanted to do for a while. Basically, a disruptive player or group of players can ruin a locker room and make poor choices on the field. On the flip side, good leaders can overcome the trouble problem childs. With Team Chemistry, it takes the troublemakers (poor Discipline score) and combines it with the leaders (High IQ/Discipline) and creates an overall team Chemistry score which will factor a small amount into the Game Simulation.
New Disciplinary System
Along the same lines, I've added a Disciplinary system similar to how EA Sports handles it in the NCAA Football series. Every team has an overall score between 0 and 99. The higher the score, the less likely something bad will happen. But if you disciplinary issues drop you below 30%, you will get a minor infraction (minor prestige and monetary fines) and warning. If you drop below 0% you will get a bowl ban and major prestige and monetary fines.
Throughout the course of a season, there will be random opportunities for each team to have a team/player disciplinary problem. The more troublemakers on your team, the more likely you will have an issue. Your coach's discipline handling skill score will also play into this. If your coach can calm the team/player down, you will not have an issue and your Team Discipline Score will go up. If he cannot, then the score goes down, the player may get suspended, and it may affect prestige (bad press!).
In the future, I may put in a User Prompt for more interaction like it is in the NCAA series. The code is already there for the prompt, but it has not been activated yet because I haven't worked the entire back end to handle it.
Team Facilities & Money System
Another feature is money. Each team now can make money on ticket sales and merch sales. The ticket and merch sales are based off of each game's overall prestige (combined total of both teams), the type of game (reg season vs bowl vs playoffs), and whether the team is home or away. The home team will take the majority cut of the profits.
The profits can then be used, and currently, as automatic upgrades to the team's training facilities. Each facility upgrade cost more than the previous. But in turn, a facility upgrade will boost the likelihood of improving player ratings (better training!), and will increase the team's prestige (see the Nike Ducks).
Bowl System Changes
Two things here. The bowl system now includes up to 40 some-odd bowl games. But not all may be employed in any given year. The game will dynamically change the number of bowl games based on the amount of teams that qualify with my 7 Win total rule. (YOU SHOULD BE A WINNING TEAM TO PLAY IN THE POST SEASON!!)
In addition, I added a FIX BOWL NAMES button in the Settings menu if, for some rare reason, your bowl game names become NULL.
Update: Coaching Database
This is coming out real soon. This will remove coaching records from the League and Team History files but instead will save and compile every coach ever in your current save into a database that you can view their data, ranked by various coaching categories. I'm excited about this feature since this is what the game is all about - the career of the coach!
Other little things
Lots of bug fixes along the way and text fixes.
Roadmap/Ideas:
Divisions is still a work-in-progress. Code is all ready to go but there are bugs to how the game handles the varying conference structure that still needs to be worked through.
Mid-Season saves is in development. A chunk of the code to save a file is in-place but still have a lot to do for the loading portion of it, and then implementing it in a way to account for all the random factors that occur in this fully customizable version of the game.
Once those are done, I'll consider play calling and recruiting updates. But I may turn my way to the Pros instead (more likely).
Prooooos
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