After a slow month in May, June flew by, and there’s a lot of cool new stuff that’s in the game now. With the match and promo simulation engine largely complete, development for the rest of the summer is going to be primarily focused on building out the financial engine. And there’s a lot done now on that front, so let’s dive in.
FINANCIAL OVERVIEW
A brief word about all of this up front - all of these components are still under active development, so the look and functionality will likely change quite a bit in the future. My development method for every new system is to get a rough version in the game so I can play around with it, then work on tightening up the interface, and then at the very end do a bunch of work to balance the numbers. Right now I’m very much in the “create rough versions of new systems” phase.
Central to the financial component of the game is an overview screen that lets the player see their promotion’s overall finances at a glance. Obviously needs a lot of balancing since right out of the gate in a new game the promotion is losing money. A lot of these values are also placeholders that I’m replacing with real data as those systems come online.
WRESTLER CONTRACTS
Negotiating contracts is always one of the most fun parts of sports simulation games for me, so I’m pleased that there’s now a functioning contracts mini-game available. Every wrestler now gets a default contract when a new game is started, but as contracts expire you get to play a mini-game where the wrestler will tell you what they’re looking for and give some feedback on your offers.
Currently you can only sign wrestlers who already work for you, but soon I’ll be adding the ability to scout up-and-coming talents and lure away wrestlers from other promotions.
You may have noticed the “expected monthly usage” value. That’s a new system that’s going to interact with Morale, although it requires a lot of development still. The basic idea is that wrestlers will want a certain amount of TV time each month depending on their role in the company. I’ll go into that system in more detail once it’s closer to being finished.
TICKETS AND MERCH
The last big new feature this month is that each TV show now generates some ticket sales and merchandise revenue.
Merchandise and ticket sales each starts with a base value for every show depending on how well you’re doing in the TV ratings war, as well as the popularity of your roster. Then there are bonuses applied to those base values depending on which wrestlers appear on the card. Wrestlers with more popularity will generate more revenue, and it’s easier to sell tickets if your champions are featured on a card. You’ll be able to see how much revenue each specific match adds on the match creation screen. I’m not 100% sure if I’ll keep that in the final version, but in general I tend to lean towards transparency in how systems work. A bit of mystery is always good, but in general I think in a strategy game the player should be able to know where all the values are coming from, otherwise it winds up feeling random and unfair.