GAMEPLAN            

PRIORITIES

Something we'll need to do with the current round of changes in Gameplan is be careful with priorities. We've got a limited budget and we must be careful with our costs. This means time as well as money (because it's time that turns into money, at least in the absence of some great inspiration - or a well armed gang of bank robbers). This means some things that you might want to get into you'll find I'm not interested in. That'll be because I think they'll take up lots of time in relation to what we get back.

CURRENT PLAN

Right now I'm in the office full time, after having been working on games stuff only in my spare time for the last few years. The money I'll make this year probably won't be enough to keep the business going, but then I thought the same back in '87 as well (and kept going for twelve years). I can stay full time all this year, but the long term plan still involves splitting my time between games and contract jobs. By the end of the year I might be running around trying to work out how to pay the bills. Or if something I fancy comes up sooner, then I'll take it, and get back to this when I can.

If I'm still here doing the same thing this time next year then it will be because I got through a lot of work and we sold a lot of turns. Gameplan isn't going to do this for us, although it's possible it will play a part (if we work up some ideas that bring new players to the game, or bring old ones back).

What this means is you're going to find I will set Gameplan aside for periods while I work on other things. In the creative and constructive stages of a game I find I work best by clearing other stuff out of the way and concentrating on one job at a time. Smart ideas and unexpected mappings between simple rules and complex realties come about when you jumble lots of ideas together in your head and let them simmer quietly. For several days, at least, and often longer.

This isn't a task to rush into, anyway. We don't want to break things that work.

PRIORITIES

I don't want to be hopping back and forth from one game to another. It'll slow me down and reduce the quality of the results. You may find some patience is required. Emails will go unanswered, and feedback will seem like it's being ignored. In emails it'd be a good idea to keep urgent routine stuff (eg. about games in progress) separate from feedback things and questions that can be set aside and still make sense later.

You can help by giving some thought to priorities yourselves. Before asking for one thing or another, stop to think whether it's something you really want to see time being spent on, relative to some of the new things we could be working on instead. If the proportion of kickoffs returned, or the yardage on returns isn't quite right, how much does that matter? Would you rather have assistant coaches to help control the long term development of your team? If the play timings seem a bit off, is that worth more than adding some new player skills? Time I spend on one thing is time I don't spend on another.

If you've not encountered the current thinking on how to decide priorities, the idea is to separate what is urgent and what is important, and understand that these are two different things. Improvements to Gameplan are important but not urgent.

SOFTSIM WEBSITE

The top priority at present is making more games available through the softsim website, so that you can input your orders online. For the most part this uses different resources to developing new games and writing updates for sidetracks (the changes in the game itself are already done, the specification and data definitions have been written, and the implementation work on the softsim website is contracted out).

The draft game will use the same resources, so the interactive draft can't actually happen until after the online turnsheets are done. I reckon we'll need at least four different turnsheets, and maybe as many as eight, although it will be the first one that takes most of the effort. Although we can talk about it, plan it, and look at how to promote it, and try to work out whether it will sell.

Since you'll ask, the different turnsheets are basic, advanced (normal, initial and extended, probably all separate), draft sheet and roster sheet (this for whole rosters, names and numbers, to make setting up new teams and variant games a lot easier). The draft sheet might need to be in different versions for the different rounds, for minicamp and camp, where the orders allowed are different in each case.

SIDETRACKS WEBSITE

I have still to write up initial notes on the idea for the jumbo version and the draft game, and once those are done we'll probably go back over the same ground in more detail. I'll work on the roster and draft changes as we go along, adding things one at a time. This should work through the essential changes that we think we want everywhere, before we make up our minds on versions and variants and things that are more experimental.

OTHER GAMES

At the current count I've got fourteen different games to maintain, and more if you count extra for games with different versions. There's one new game that needs to be finished and running at full speed by the summer, and another that will need to be well under way by Autumn. At least two other games need substantial amounts of work during the next month or so. These are the bare minimum, and I expect I'll need to get through at least a couple of others as well, to expand the range of things we can do.

It's mainly the new games and the promotions for them that will decide how many of the things we want to try in Gameplan we can afford to carry through.