Boeckham's Football Manager · published · build 24865101
Hello everyone,
Once again, a few weeks have passed since the last update. I hope the new additions will enhance your experience with the game.
First, I managed to integrate the foreign leagues - 19 to be precise - so every country has at least its complete first league. These will be simulated as well as the cup in that country. That way, the Master League and Europe Cup participants can now be taken from real league results. The new clubs can be inspected at several spots in the game: in the league table, the transfer market, player search, league and cup results, and the history of each club in the stats screen.
Selection in the transfer market
Selection in the league standings
Unfortunately, there have been many problems and bugs while implementing this, so I had to postpone some of my ideas until the next update. My plan for this is, that you will be able to get hired in another country. Knowledge of a foreign language will be important (looking at you, educations!). Player names should also fit better for their country, and you should be able to use custom club files for each country.
Another new feature is events in the lives of your players. Those can affect their strengths in a positive or negative way. This will be of a short duration and will diminish in the following weeks. The strength bonuses are not lost or gained permanently! For example, one of your players might become a father, and he might be so thrilled he will play with extra motivation, or he might be panicking, not being able to hit the ball anymore ;) Those events will be a bit rare and don't have too much influence overall, but might lead to cool story moments: the new father, a rather mediocre player, scores the winning goal in the cup final. For each of those events, a note in your diary gets written, and in your player's table, the strenghts will be formatted in bold or italic, depending on the positive or negative effect.
A few more story elements were added as well. From time to time, you will be interviewed after a match, players could try to use doping, or the club - very simple - will receive money from a heritage or similar events. The whole story events were made a bit rarer, mixed with more randomness, so they won't repeat themselves so much. As always, there needs to be much more story events in the game, but I realized how much time it takes to plan, implement, and test those multi-week events. But don't worry, every update will add little by little :)
When the game acted funny or faulty, the reason was not always clear. I added a new window that will show more information in case of an unforeseen error (if I could foresee the error, I would fix it before releasing the update ;) This information will help greatly in giving you proper support, so please send the text along with your bug reports. Strange effects could also happen with some mods, or extreme difficulty settings. I tried to diffuse some of those issues that were known to me.
In general, at some places, the performance of the game has been enhanced. The time it takes to go to the next week after a match is 50% faster now. Some usability issues were addressed, you can now see in the menu which screen you are in, and clicking on the blue ribbons at the bottom of the screen will open and close them, so no need to select a new content to be shown.
Bugs have been fixed as well, for example, the payment of your sponsorship bonus for winning the championship (and now also for getting promoted), corrected price calculations for extending the stadium, and a fix for endless penalty shootouts in case all of the players were exhausted completely, and many more. Oh, and the board can't fire you from your own club anymore, no matter what you do wrong.
Thanks to everyone who reported bugs and wishes instead of going for a bad review. Small games like Boeckham's are in dire need of good reviews. So thank you for your patience! :)
Special thanks to Stromwoken, RedRaven, AlterEgo45, chaddid, Römsen, P39_KingCobra, chikn, and Koga73 (thanks for your super detailed doc!). And everyone I forgot to mention here!
And now have fun with the update and keep looking forward to the next one!
p.s. "Wouldn't the updates be much faster using AI and vibe coding?" Possible. But there is little fun in that for me. And if the result is always better remains doubtful. So I will continue to stubbornly hammer my code by hand :)