Pigskin Panic

Football Fields

2009-01-05T17:36:00.000-08:00

Spent some more time working on field drawing. It's coming along, just needs some goal posts on the ends.

I hope it's not too big to put a decent interface underneath.

The next thing I'm going to work on is position assignment for player's on the team. I'm not really sure how football works in this way, but I guess you need a couple of squads; offenses, defenses, kicking teams? Something like that. I'll have to do some research before implementing it.

I'd also like to automate this so the player can not have to deal with all the minutia, also, I'll need to do this anyway because the AI will need to select its teams.

After that I can get the actual game running; maybe in a simplified way. And after that I can start to spend some time on the highschool/training parts.

Tryouts, Players, and Stats

2009-01-04T12:15:00.001-08:00

I finished adding players, tryouts, and stats yesterday.

Player generation has two parts: name generation and stat generation.

Name generation was pretty easily accomplished after the work I did on the school name generators. First names are chosen from a list of first names. Last names are a bit more interesting; they have the same prefix, middle syllables, suffix construction used in the school name generator, just the files of text pieces used are different.

I generate the following statistics for each player:
Speed - Governs how many actions you get on your turn.
Brawn - How much damage you do.
Heft - How much damage you can withstand.
Smarts - Governs play selection for QBs and school performance.
Manners - Leadership ability/sweet talking skill.
Tossing - How well you can throw the ball. (grenades?)
Catching - How well you can catch.
Kicking - Field goals, kick-offs, and streetfighting.

Each stat is basically 3d6, but you get added to that your grade level minus 9.

The major part of tryouts is done now too.

Tryouts are basically keep it or trade it for 15 players out of a total of 25. (The numbers may change). Once you reject a player you have no chance to get them back, so you maybe need to hedge against the unknown. Also, you probably want some younger players so you can have them move into more crucial roles.

I don't know when I'll get some decent chunks of time to work on this again, but hopefully not too long from now.

Name Generation

2009-01-02T17:17:00.000-08:00

I spent today working on the school and team name generation.

The system I have in place generates town names and team names. Town names are pretty simple. I have three lists, prefixes, middle syllables, and suffixes. I pick a prefix from a list, add zero to three syllables, and end with a suffix. They get goofy, but it's OK.

The team names are much better. I went to http://www.tekonsha.k12.mi.us/scaa/teamnames.htm and copied down all the names and adjectives that were not too silly. I also added a ton of my own. Some teams get adjectives and some don't.

That's all there is to it.

Oh, I gave each school a color too.

Next I'm going to work on player generation and then it should be easy to do try-outs!

Pigskin Panic Begin

2009-01-02T15:33:00.000-08:00

Hello. This is Matt Fister's development journal for Pigskin Panic, a highschool football management simulation, with high levels of ridiculousness.