EHM The Blue Line

My love of Hockey simulators started back with the first simulator Eastside produced and has continued ever since. With the lack of updates and improvements made to EHM 2007 I went searching for replacements.
Franchise Hockey Manager seams to be the only real alternative to EHM and after months of waiting for real results in their development I have become disenfranchised.
With all that I started thinking of how to take the hockey simulator forward and how one could develop something that is truly original and fun.

My background:
Age: 47
Education: Marketing
Work history: 10 years in network administration, 3 Years in wireless related R&D

I would love to hear your feedback and interest level in developing the project that follows.

For now lets call this project:

The Hockey Manager Googolplex

First off, like we are all accustomed, you will be able to simulate Games/Seasons/Playoffs. You will be able to sign free agents, trade players, hire coaches/trainers and scouts and so on.
The end goal will be to have a completely historical league option. (There will have to be much thought put into how the players will be rated and how their stats will change playing in different eras.)

New / Revamped Features:

Player Potential:
Player potential has been far too static in the simulators to this point especially from the ages of 14-17. Years ago Angelo Espisito was rated to be the "Next" star but through situation and/or events he later turned out to be a bust. What is envisioned for player potential to have a more fluid system. Every year a player will have a base potential then year over year until 27 the potential can be raised or lowered. Several factors will work to determine if you have a recipe for success or failure on your team. The better your scouts/trainers/coaches the better idea you will have in creating the right circumstances.

Chemistry:
Though eluded to in other Hockey simulators chemistry has never really had its full effect. In HMG the chemistry of the players,coaches and hockey market will play a much more significant role.

Training:
This will be the most extensive package in the game because if we wanted to play a hockey game there are numerous titles like EA's NHL 2014 that we could purchase and play. The SIM community from my experience wants to make his/her team better by "managing" the team more effectively than other humans or the computer.

If you have the coaching option selected that you will have to choose a drill and tactics routine for your team. Like in real leagues there are limitations as far as time as to what you can pack into a practice. Each drill/tactic will have a time factor associated with it. The players then will gain and/or lose attributes according to their activities. So what that means is young players will be able to advance quickly physically but it will take them a while to gain the mental aspect. Older players will loose physical stats quicker than younger players when injured/ off-season/ not training but they will likely have mental attributes that are much higher. (This is all done to mimic the lifespan of a hockey player.)

Marketing / Public relations:(Able Turn On/Off)
This will be an option for the real SIM fans. To put bluntly you need to put bums in the seats. Poor attendance will lower not only the operating budget for the team but also the moral. You will need to become adept at handling scandalous behavior, bad press, and accidents. The more good PR out there the more income flow you will have for things like new arenas, training research, and better training facilities.
When turned off the AI (Artificial Intelligence) will take over but effects good and bad will be greatly reduced.

Trainers/ Team Doctors:
The better your trainers/ doctors the fewer injuries you will receive. Trainers will also reduce recovery times, increase physical training effectiveness, and increase moral. Your doctors and trainers will also be able to spot problems with mental state, sight and hearing and in some cases improve a player greatly.

Year End Reviews:
Every Player, Coach, Trainer, and Scout will receive a year end review and your job as General Manager will be to take action on the review. Take the wrong action and the individual will regress.

Coaches/ Trainers/ Scouts/ Managers:
As GM you will need to choose action plans for your staff. Do it right and they will get better. Do it wrong and they will get worse. Be careful though because if you make them too good and other teams will poach them in the off season. Unlike players the staff is not bound by contracts. If their career advances or they are paid substantially more they will be gone.

Advanced Training Camp: (Able Turn On/Off)
Like in the real Hockey Leagues training camp will be the most important thing you do all year. In advanced mode you will have to dispatch your staff to perform extra duties/drills/activities on a player by player basis. The quality of your staff will determine the advice you receive daily. The better your staff the more correct recommendations you will receive.

Rules Committee: (Able Turn On/Off)(League Level)
As a GM you will be able to lobby for rule changes. The more money you dedicate to changes the more likely the rule will be changed. Unlike most other features there is no way to gauge what the rule change will do. If you take out fighting in one league it may increase goals scored by 15%, increase the effectiveness of all players under 5' 10", decrease career ending injuries by 50%, and increase career length by 40%. In your next league the same rule change could result in 25% chance to increase injuries, reduce career length by 25%, and increase career ending injuries by 75%.

Change a rule and it will be in effect for a minimum of 1 year. Effects increase injuries and reduce goals will be easier to change back. Trying to change a rule because it adversely affects your team because of size and/or player types and you could be out in the cold.

Research and Development: (Able Turn On/Off)
Exactly what it says. You will be given options of what you would like to research with an approximate cost and time line. Events in the game or media could help or hinder your project. Once completed the R&D item tree will open up a new item to research. The more successful you are in Marketing and on ice performance the more money and resources you can put towards researching various branches.

To even the playing field the bottom 3 teams will randomly generate a needed adaptation for thier team at a greatly reduced cost and timeframe.
The effects of R&D generally will have the greatest effects on developing teams and only by a very small amount.

Player Generation:(Able Turn On/Off)(League Level)
A large number of SIM players desire a player they can create with some of the attributes they desire. Now too often in the past these generators have been flawed in that the player created was either a god or in certain cases complete rubbish. In HMG you will be able to generate a player named by you, for the cost of a first round pick, with the height, weight, position, and play style you choose. Initially he will start as a "Gifted" hockey player. A step above a regular player. Then for about 20 mins you will choose 6 activities that will make him a better/worse player. After each activity it will analyze the results and the type of activity and advance/ reduce his attributes and/or potential.

Thats a very impressive list of features. Dreaming for it to happen.

CeeBee wrote:Thats a very impressive list of features. Dreaming for it to happen.

Everybody is entitled to their opinions.

Personally I think it is the limits we put on ourselves that prevent anything great from happening. None of the ideas above are overly complex but it will require the vision to be maintained and to not get side tracked. I can see from the lack of responses, despite my years of frequenting this site and observing the community, that I may have misjudged the people.

I REALLY enjoy simulators and EHM was a fantastic source of entertainment pushing 2 decades but that has come to an end. FHM IMO is a clunky project full of partially finished features and no real vision of what it is supposed to be. None of the features are innovative and worst of all the actual simulation process is poor on performance. Now I could get into all the flaws in FHM but that serves no purpose. Lets just say that IMO that FHM will not become half of what EHM had in even the 2005 version. Thus why I am looking into doing my own project.

I am not asking if you think it is possible or the pitfalls along the way. I know this project is possible and I do understand a great deal about the process of developing the required software as I have been in charge of working with several different groups of software developers in my previous endeavors.

Now my intention of the above post was to ask if the community was interested in a hockey simulator with the features I listed above and if they would be willing to purchase the FINISHED product when it was done.

Kraqule wrote:I can see from the lack of responses, despite my years of frequenting this site and observing the community, that I may have misjudged the people.

I wouldn't necessarily say you misjudged the people, it's just that they've seen many individuals over the years propose their own hockey management games, and none of them have actually amounted to anything; it's been all talk and no action. Basically, we've been stuck for the last five years or so in the initial "dreams and ideas" phase, and I think many of us are at the point now where we just want to see some tangible results.

So, don't be put-off by the lack of responses. If you can produce some tangible results and prove that this project can and will happen, I guarantee the community will come running. But until then, many are going to remain skeptical.

I completely agree with B.Stinson. The interest is very much still here. It's just that FHM was released last month and arguably it has disappointed most people. I think a lot of people are feeling a bit exasperated right now.

As Brian says, don't let that put you off. If you users can see some real progress being made then the users will most certainly get interested in your project. There is a really big desire for a successor to EHM 2007. You should take a look at our DHM Forum because that has a lot of great ideas and it shows how much interest the community has once some tangible progress has been shared: http://www.ehmtheblueline.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=47

As mentioned above we've had promises made about these things, even screenshots and then nothing happens . What you are planning sounds great to me and if it happens then you 100% have a customer here! So good luck

Kraqule wrote:I can see from the lack of responses, despite my years of frequenting this site and observing the community, that I may have misjudged the people.

Kraqule wrote:Now my intention of the above post was to ask if the community was interested in a hockey simulator with the features I listed above and if they would be willing to purchase the FINISHED product when it was done.

With a paid development team it took SI two years to develop the first (non freeware) EHM.
With a paid development team it took OOTP two years to develop FHM.
Dabo's project, with a volunteer development team, started over three years ago...

Are you intending on financing a development team?
Or are you soliciting volunteers for a development team you'll manage?
Or are you doing everything yourself?
Who's going to actually "create the code" for the game?

For me these questions are what first came to my mind when I read your post...

nino33 wrote: With a paid development team it took SI two years to develop the first (non freeware) EHM.
With a paid development team it took OOTP two years to develop FHM.
Dabo's project, with a volunteer development team, started over three years ago...

1. EHM was the first good Hockey Simulator. 2 years was not unreasonable to come up with a completely new concept back in a time before .Net frameworks and the modern computer languages. Their innovation and perseverance paid off with a very good end product.

2. I really question the skill level of the coders and the project manager of FHM. Here are just a few of the most glaring faults in FHM:
*The GM does not skill up and to hire a coach you need to manipulate the game in commissioner mode to hire a coach.
*When you set the training the game over-rides your settings.
*Scouts have no real purpose in the game.
*There is no daily scoreboard to see the league wide games.
*No leagues other than the one that your playing get adjusted meaning your draftees do not get better from sitting in Junior or the AHL.
*The Simulation process is incredibly slow probably done through a single foreach statement in a flat file so that performance is poor and not using the resources of your PC. With every action it seams that the script has to constantly recall from the hard drive.

FHM is simply put a project with no vision, no leadership, and lacks basic scripting skills. They may have a paid team but the team has no clue.

3. Dabo's volunteer team is in tough because the likely do not have the financial resources to provide anything quickly. They are likely working against problems coordinating thus making it difficult to accomplish their goals.

nino33 wrote:Are you intending on financing a development team?
Or are you soliciting volunteers for a development team you'll manage?
Or are you doing everything yourself?
Who's going to actually "create the code" for the game?

For me these questions are what first came to my mind when I read your post...

The team will be financed.

My time in R&D is likely the most important experience in embarking on this en devour. It allowed me to work with software that incorporated several different programming languages and thus I had to be able to "manage" and direct the focus of coders. On a side note I have just enough coding skill to be dangerous in C++, C#, Java, HTML, PHP, and Ruby.

Where projects like this get into trouble it is usually because there is a lack of vision and management. You then have coders getting off track trying to develop "Something COOL!" for the software and in their quest to do something good they ignore the basics of what the software needs to do.
EHM has laid the groundwork for what is expected within a simulator. Their features are the standard now of this genre and thus there is no need for the recreation of the wheel. Most fantasy leagues online now feature a lot of what they did so now the real question is how to take that to the next level and I think the above project will indeed do that.

Quite conceivably my project could be in the BETA testing phase within 3 months and into a polished salable version in 6-8 months. Coding today is much easier today. With the modern version of Java and/or .Net framework instructions it makes it so much easier to write software than it was when SI did it 20 years ago.

You want to know a small secret? If this is all received well my next goal would be to take the hockey simulator to the most modern level and make it available to Tablets, Phones and other android based mediums.

Now after all that it comes down to one simple thing. If I do this project will enough people buy it. 3 coders @ $50 k and a Graphic artist at 25K comes to $175 k then you add on office space and work stations and you have a figure of $250 k.

At $25 per game sold you would need to sell at least 10,000 units to break even. 10,000 units does not even allow for me to be paid a dime thus why I want to know who is interested in such a project.

SO now the question is are you in or are you out?

I'd definately buy a product with those features in it!

Don't get me wrong when I said I dream of a game with those features. Ehm is the best we have for now. FHM..... the dream is a nightmare so far, Dabo's game is still in the dream stage for the public anyway and yours is a dream as well. I play EHM almost daily still. I bought FHM because I was hoping it would become the next EHM or better. I'd buy Dabo's if it ever got to market and I'll buy yours as well. I'm neither a skeptic or a believer.... yet, but I'm most certainly hoping and waiting for a game that will blow EHM out of the water and off my hard drive one day! I truly hope there are enough buyers out there and that you can make it happen. Best of luck and I'll certainly be watching.

I think pretty much everybody on this site would be interested in a good hockey simulator!

Kraqule wrote:FHM is simply put a project with no vision, no leadership, and lacks basic scripting skills. They may have a paid team but the team has no clue.

While I'm hugely disappointed with the FHM team and in the current game FHM, I'm not willing to be so disparaging.
They undoubtedly tried to do too much too soon, and some of their development decisions are difficult/impossible to understand...but the potential is still there.

Kraqule wrote:Quite conceivably my project could be in the BETA testing phase within 3 months and into a polished salable version in 6-8 months.

Wow that seems optimistic...


Regarding specific "features" you mentioned - for me I at this time can't see myself having much interest in the described Marketing/Public relations, Rules Committee, Research and Development, and Player Generation features.....in fact, they sound to me like the "feature creep" that occurred with FHM. While they may be great features they wouldn't be the reason I'd buy the game...I want a hockey simulator. For me any improvements on the business/management side must be accompanied by an exceptional game simulator.

Kraqule wrote:EHM has laid the groundwork for what is expected within a simulator. Their features are the standard now of this genre and thus there is no need for the recreation of the wheel.

I totally agree!
I think the in-game experience is the key; I think there needs to be a detailed, high quality simulation (so things like Strategy and Training have relevance) that is immersive for the user


I most definitely wish you good luck!


Regards


P.S. You refer to EHM "pushing two decades ago" and being developed "in a time before .Net frameworks" - the first version of EHM was released 9 years ago, EHM07 came out 7 years ago

nino33 wrote:
P.S. You refer to EHM "pushing two decades ago" and being developed "in a time before .Net frameworks" - the first version of EHM was released 9 years ago, EHM07 came out 7 years ago

Pardon me you are correct on that but I do believe one of the devs responsible for creating was involved with HOCKEY LEAGUE SIMULATOR 2. HLS2 was a simulator that interfaced with Wayne Gretzky hockey. Rather innovative for its time. I could be wrong but I think that is why I purchased EHM's first version.

I would definitely pay money to see a game like this. Love EHM and still play it today, Bought FHM and not to take anything away from those guys but I just can't get into that game right now. I think when its actually finished then probably be a fun game to play. But this idea here sounds like the type of Hockey Sim I would enjoy much more. Good luck!

nino33 wrote:

Kraqule wrote:EHM has laid the groundwork for what is expected within a simulator. Their features are the standard now of this genre and thus there is no need for the recreation of the wheel.

I totally agree!
I think the in-game experience is the key; I think there needs to be a detailed, high quality simulation (so things like Strategy (tactics must have a solid role) and Training have relevance) that is immersive for the user

If the *project* resembles anything close to the described above and having in mind that I (and likely many others) bought FHM once the open beta was announced and never played it since, I see no reason people won't buy this.

Kraqule wrote:

nino33 wrote:
P.S. You refer to EHM "pushing two decades ago" and being developed "in a time before .Net frameworks" - the first version of EHM was released 9 years ago, EHM07 came out 7 years ago

Pardon me you are correct on that but I do believe one of the devs responsible for creating was involved with HOCKEY LEAGUE SIMULATOR 2. HLS2 was a simulator that interfaced with Wayne Gretzky hockey. Rather innovative for its time. I could be wrong but I think that is why I purchased EHM's first version.

I think you might be mistaken. Riz worked on freeware EHM before SI. That was a freeware game based on Visual Basic. EHM 2004/2005/2007 was written using C++ IIRC.

I completely echo CeeBee and Nino's sentiments. Keep us posted on your progress.

1. Great idea.
2. We will hold you to it. I love your confidence, but because I have no idea who you are at this point I will say I am going to hold you to it. are you full of bravado and garbage and being one of those --I am better than everyone kind of people, or ARE YOU AS I HOPE--a guy who gets things done.

If you are the latter as I hope you are I look forward to coming here in EXACTLY 3 months from your post-- JANUARY 20 2014---and seeing posts from everyone hailing your excellency in game development, a field you do not seem to have experience in...although you do have coding and marketing and apparently other business related skills.

this is sincere...if you pull this off. GREAT STUFF" I hope the beta is a beta and far outweighs the beta versions anyone else has put out in Hockey Sim type games.

In other words...GIT ER DONE! Love the ideas, but please please please make sure you have at least

1. Fictional leagues.
2. Historical leagues.
3. Intergalactic leagues
4. 3 year old leagues.
5. Female leagues
6. Chicken - Panther hyrbid leagues
7 and a hockey team in Toronto.

Cannot wait to see this.

Yes women in the game are clearly important for us here. We don't want the website to be associated as misogynist.

A hockey game that delivers what you have proposed is I something that I would definitely buy.

I just wasted 5 minutes reading all this...although batdad's comment made it worth while.

I think this is the appropriate place for me to propse MY idea. Here's my thoughts, the leafs have made awful trades, bad draft picks and don't have the talent for winning a cup. My idea is that they bring in the talent, make stellar trades and win the Stanley cup. They currently have no vision; They need vision and dedication. you guys interested in seeing that? Tell me what you think.

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Well we all had some reservations about that guy. It's not the first coming here with a good idea but never finish it. Move on now.