A penny for your thoughts about a football supporter simulator mobile game

Suppose there was a mobile game that is a football supporter simulator and a bit of a God game rolled into one. It doesn't involve playing football or football management/ownership. Instead, it revolves around being a football supporter, competing against supporters from rival teams and some 'god game' aspects.

During playing you are presented with various events, similar to events in Sim City, but relating to football supporting and not all of them are bad or even important. These events have minimal if any interaction from the player and are NOT like quests/missions/tasks.

For example, there's an event that is a regular league football match that starts and ends. As you are playing the game a message pops up that the football game kicked off and another one for the end of the game, along with a score. Based on the score, you can be rewarded.

Currently it's designed to have a football season last a week, so football matches are at real-world times of 10am, 2pm, 6pm, and 10pm on weekdays with post/pre season stuff on a weekend. Each match is also 5 minutes long

Unfortunately the big issue with this that because it's a casual game, the chance of you actually playing it during one of those 5 minutes windows that are only once every 4 hours is extremely slim to the point of being almost pointless having game events at all.

One idea is to shrink the season to a day instead of a week and make it a little bit more unrealistic. Have a 5 minute league match every 30m, with post/pre season stuff later in the day. This does help the situations as the games are more often, but you could still miss them if you only play for a short time.

Trying a different idea: There's only one match a day, and you can interact with it at any time during that day instead of a specific time. For example, when you open the game (at any time during the day) you get a message saying "The game against Whatever FC is about to kick off, would you like to attend?".. When you click yes you get the footy game stuff. So basically there's not a set time, any time during the day that is convenient for you happens at any time during the day. While unrealistic in the real world with specific KO times it would be good for gamers who don't have a lot of time. This has limitations, you can only have one game a day.. with weekends for pre-season matches.

I could extend this to one match per hour, where you can choose to take part in that game at any part during that hour.

Another option is games are regular, and you're just told the scores AFTER the fact like the real world and don't have to be present. The problem with this is that there's other type of events that occur before each match, during, half time, full time that would be made very mundane if they were just a list after the fact.

Basically, my question is how and when should a football game event be presented to the player who may be on for just a few minutes.

I'm missing out huge colossal chunks of details and lots of other aspects of the game, but what do you think about when/how games should present themselves?
 


It seems you already know your problem with this, mobile games are casual, it's something to have a quick blast on while you're having a shit.

Why not start games whenever the player wants but have random event games that give more points come through as push notifications? Dangle a carrot.

I was going to suggest an Idle clicker thing but looking at the play store there are fuck tons of footy ones. :lol:

If you made it I'd give it a bash because you're on this board obv
 
Theres an online "game" called blaseball I got into late last year after hearing about it on twitter as a bit of a distraction from WFH as you could leave it running on a tab and just check in every now and again. The season lasted Monday-Friday, with a game starting at the top the hour, 24 hours a day, for the week. Perhaps a little different to what you're putting together, the main gameplay hook was gambling fake currency on the games, but the timing and frequency of the games meant it you missed a few, especially during the night it wasn't of any great consequence as you could just pick up at the next game when you were online.

Their main selling point I guess was that the game didn't stick to conventional sporting rules whatsoever, infact it went out of its way to implement weird and wonderful events/incidents. Far too many to mention, but its an interesting concept and how their fanbase grew and developed their own "lore" etc around the game:

An absurdist baseball game is tearing up the internet, thanks to fans
 
Theres an online "game" called blaseball I got into late last year after hearing about it on twitter as a bit of a distraction from WFH as you could leave it running on a tab and just check in every now and again. The season lasted Monday-Friday, with a game starting at the top the hour, 24 hours a day, for the week. Perhaps a little different to what you're putting together, the main gameplay hook was gambling fake currency on the games, but the timing and frequency of the games meant it you missed a few, especially during the night it wasn't of any great consequence as you could just pick up at the next game when you were online.

Their main selling point I guess was that the game didn't stick to conventional sporting rules whatsoever, infact it went out of its way to implement weird and wonderful events/incidents. Far too many to mention, but its an interesting concept and how their fanbase grew and developed their own "lore" etc around the game:

An absurdist baseball game is tearing up the internet, thanks to fans
Interesting some of what you've said is useful thanks. I've abandoned the idea of having matches at specific times because it's likely for a casual videogame you won't be on at a time when one happens. Instead I've implemented a window where if you play the videogame you trigger a match. One trigger per window. The window at the moment is half an hour, but I can change that to anything I want. There's also loads of other events relating to being a footy supporter that trigger too, like end of season parties, losing your season ticket and getting promoted etc..
 
OSM is an online manager game. Theres 1 game a day, and you just view it whenever you log on after the game has been played.

For example, game is being played at 6pm, you can set up your team throughout the day, select your line-up etc. Then if you can't be on your phone at the Kick off time/forget about it, you just view the match at any point after. The match engine is only "Chance! Missed!" "Chance! GOAL! Charlie Wyke", mind.
 
Just out of interest, when you say you are competing against supporters of rival teams, what sort of things would this involve?
 
Just out of interest, when you say you are competing against supporters of rival teams, what sort of things would this involve?
This side of the game is the metagame and for now mostly involves league tables to do with various things you do within a game. Like the number of supporters you have in a certain town, how many collections you have completed, how many tasks (quests) you've completed, general stats like how much coin and XP you have. None of the metagame is real-time or involves avatars running around.
The hope is to leverage the natural rivalry and tribalism supporters have and use that to get them to compete with supporters of other teams.

This is one of those collections: This involves getting logos for away pubs.
 
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This side of the game is the metagame and for now mostly involves league tables to do with various things you do within a game. Like the number of supporters you have in a certain town, how many collections you have completed, how many tasks (quests) you've completed, general stats like how much coin and XP you have. None of the metagame is real-time or involves avatars running around.
The hope is to leverage the natural rivalry and tribalism supporters have and use that to get them to compete with supporters of other teams.

This is one of those collections: This involves getting logos for away pubs.

Are you actually making this app?

A nice idea would be that you only have a certain amount of 'points' to spend on things like a way days.

For example, if you're a fan of Arsenal, you're likely to play the likes of City, United, Liverpool, Everton away every season so you'd only invest 1 'point' into those away games. With that 1 point you can visit 1 away pub, but you know you'll more than likely go again the following season to tick more off.

However, if Arsenal got a lower league team in the cup who they might not play again for a long time, you might want to spend more points on this away day, and therefore go to more pubs etc.

If you have 50 points over the season to allocate as the season progresses, you can pick and choose which away days to go on, and which to spend more 'points' on to collect things. Suppose that'd be abit realistic and also add abit of strategy.
 
Are you actually making this app?

A nice idea would be that you only have a certain amount of 'points' to spend on things like a way days.

For example, if you're a fan of Arsenal, you're likely to play the likes of City, United, Liverpool, Everton away every season so you'd only invest 1 'point' into those away games. With that 1 point you can visit 1 away pub, but you know you'll more than likely go again the following season to tick more off.

However, if Arsenal got a lower league team in the cup who they might not play again for a long time, you might want to spend more points on this away day, and therefore go to more pubs etc.

If you have 50 points over the season to allocate as the season progresses, you can pick and choose which away days to go on, and which to spend more 'points' on to collect things. Suppose that'd be abit realistic and also add abit of strategy.
Yeah, I am. Quite a lot has been completed already. Interesting idea. Those points you accrue could also be used as a metric to compete against other fans. Although they would have to clear to zero at the start of seasons to make it fair.
 
Here's version 2 of the main menu. There's no logo for the game yet and there are tons of background assets missing that have not been made yet.
 
There was a game call hooligans that was a fan base causing havoc

I remember that. I'd love Rockstar to bring out a third person football hooligan game like. Would be class. Mob up and arrange a meet with the opposing firm and ave it away from the old bill. You should lose points if you attack normal fans etc. They'd never make it like. 😂
 

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