Faceoff Dev Blog - 01
Hey there!
Welcome to the first ever, officially official Faceoff Dev Blog. I thought I'd begin by introducing myself. My name is Nate, and among other things, I'm the Studio Head/Lead Designer/Man with Many Hats. I'll likely be doing most of the dev blogs myself, but our Social Media team may help out on occasion. I work on essentially every aspect of the game, so I'm likely the most qualified person to talk about it. If you have any questions for me, we have a contact page available where you can send me questions directly, or you can message us on twitter. It's also worth noting I won't be attaching any development pictures right now as we're still very early in development and a lot will change as we iterate. So, everything I say below should be taken with a grain of salt as it'll probably change in some way.
With that out of the way, let's get to the meat and potatoes.
What is Faceoff, actually?
Faceoff is a simulation hockey game, envisioned to deliver a full simulation hockey experience on PC (and other platforms). But what does that actually mean? Well, that's a little more difficult to define. What most sports games define as simulation is more skewed toward the arcade, casual gameplay. I would call this Arcade Simulation. Managerial games or equivalent projects are hardcore simulation. We are a sweet spot between the two. We want players of both games to be able to pick up Faceoff and be able to get as much or as little depth as they want. In a manner of speaking, the game is flexible. And yes, Faceoff will feature gameplay both on and off the ice, this isn't a spreadsheet sim.
Hockey is pretty small comparatively in sports games and thus can't sustainably support a game for both audiences. So we realized early on that it was important to appeal to hardcore sim and arcade sim fans. Thus, why I decided to give you a lengthy explanation of what the two mean.
Won't that dumb down the experience?
To an extent. If you're expecting depth on the level of manager games, you'll probably be pretty whelmed. While we're taking inspiration from some, there is a give and take. In general, it can be a lot to learn and hard to manage, so the way we plan to work it is with a level-of-control slider at the start of dynasty mode (that can be changed mid-game). This controls how much of your tasks are delegated to your staff. This also feeds back into our staff and personnel system, with your staff having varying levels of success based on their skillsets.
The goal with this is that new or casual players can experience the game without having to be bogged down with things like repairing bathroom facilities in their arena, but players that do want that full-depth, immersive experience aren't met with harsh compromises in depth. In essence you could call it an AI handicap for players. This also means that it's much easier to simulate entire seasons for those of you that just like to skip a season or something.
What modes will Faceoff feature?
Dynasty - Our Manager/Head Coach (for High School Modes) experience.
Superstar - As it sounds, our pro mode.
Faceoff Online - A clubs mode where you and your friends can create your own club and compete online.
Exhibition - This is an umbrella for about 5-10 modes, mainly casual oriented modes like Play Now, Shootout, and more. We may later include things like outdoor games, and international tournaments in this.
(Unannounced Major Mode)
Okay so to start out, I've convinced myself for months I would hold this one close to my chest, but I feel like it's something I should just come out and tell people as it's such a major feature to so many players. That last mode is our premier mode, which for now will just be called Online Dynasty, but it'll likely take on another name. It's a combination of Superstar and Dynasty into an online league. The specifics are for my eyes only, but at a surface level, it'll allow you to run your own virtual leagues as both GMs and players. Think of it much like the clubs mode, but in a season format, and with a closed pool of teams/players. We know people have been dying for an online manager experience, but we couldn't resist the idea of allowing players and GMs to coexist in one big league. This isn't to say you have to though. If you just want to run a manager only save, that's fine. You could also run a save where you and your friend are stars on the same team. That's perfectly fine to. But the ultimate vision of this mode, is that a streamer, or an online community, or a big group of friends could get together and start their own virtual league and compete online and virtually. There's plenty of online forums doing this via spreadsheets and advanced formulas already, so why not do it for real?
I want to get this one out of the way before we venture into other dev blogs where I go more in-depth with specific features. Why can't you get licensing? I'll be candid for this portion. The team making this game is small, and while we grew up with and have a personal connection to hockey and sports games specifically, we are far from rich. All of the development is self-funded and at the moment, we do not want to start a Kickstarter or Patreon. So, with that in mind, even if the various leagues out there were exceedingly generous, we still wouldn't be able to pay the licensing fee. At this time, we are very much making do with what we have and are hoping to create a game good enough to outweigh the drawback of not having official teams.
Now there are two ways in which we could obtain licensing which I'll detail below.
Option 1 - Publishing
This one is probably unlikely, and I'll tell you why, although it's still something we're looking into, and if you're a publisher and willing to help out, we'd be interested to talk with you!
Most publishers do not like licenses, or licensing fees, and especially don't like having to negotiate for one on your behalf. This isn't necessarily a "evil corporation wants money" scenario, it's just good business. If every person came along and was like "I have the best idea for a game ever, but I need you to spend 100K+ to make it happen" it probably won't happen. That's just the way it is. Publishing is investing, and you don't want to invest in something that risky.
Now this doesn't necessarily mean we can't get publishing; some publisher out there might be so impressed with what they have that they decide it is worth the financial downpayment of licensing. That's just not likely though and even then the terms of the deal might not be acceptable to us.
Our ultimate goal is to use the funds of this game to establish our studio fully and hire more staff so that we can support the game long-term. If a publisher takes too much of the profits, then we just won't have the money for that flat out, especially with the upkeep of a multiplayer game.
Option 2 - Post-Launch
This is the strategy we're currently going with. We feel that we will be able to deliver a product good enough to stand on it's own merits without licensing to prop it up. If the game does well enough commercially, we'll then use that money to pay the licensing fees and likely either provide the leagues as a post-launch DLC (free or maybe paid, depends on the pricing model of the game as we get closer to release). This isn't a guarantee as we still need to hire staff and setup a studio to continue development post-launch, but this is the plan.
How will monetization work?
Faceoff will release once as a paid game and then will follow a sequel format. This meaning that when we feel that we can make a product that is legitimately sequel worthy, we will make a Faceoff 2, and maybe a Faceoff 3, etc. But the intention is that we will do a major update yearly, whether that be through in-game microtransactions paired with free gameplay and roster updates, or a one-time yearly paid DLC. We may also do a free to play online mode and then make offline modes available behind a premium paywall. There's lots of ways of doing this so we're still exploring right now, but these are just some of the ideas. But as I said earlier, there will be no yearly game schedule. I personally think it's a big reason why sports games today are so underwhelming, and so we'd like to avoid it. And thanks to this system we'll be able to price our DLC based on their value, and not necessarily an arbitrary number we threw together.
Modding Support & Cross-Platform Play
We intend to have almost complete modding support for everything but online clubs (for obvious reasons, cheating for one). The way we will likely have this work is that players can upload their mods to a website which can be viewed in-game, allowing players across platforms to download mods in-game. This also means when you join a friends modded save it'll automatically download their mods as well. Our intention is that everyone can play with each other regardless of platform (even handheld), and that mods shouldn't be exclusive to Steam. That also of course means that if you transfer your save from console to PC, you can always pick up where you left off.
Streamer Support
This is kind of an underrated part of the sports game experience but the streamer experience kind of sucks. Content creation in general in these games is hard. For one, most of the gameplay is staring at a screen and the other half is simulating so you can get to the action. After you do get to the action, you're mostly watching the AI play like crap, or your favorite streamer fall asleep as he sims to shift after shift in career mode.
Besides the obvious (that being better AI), we have big plans to change this, as it's my belief that for an indie game like ours to work we're going to need a lot of help in the content creation department, and that relationship should be mutually beneficial.
So, with that, we get into streamer mode. This essentially serves as a virtual input to your recording software (you, the streamer) allowing your fans to watch a broadcast style view of the game, while you're still able to play the game as you normally would. When you combine this with hotkeys you could basically run your own broadcast of the game via stream. Additionally, we plan to allow player hot joins in your career and manager modes, meaning that you could allow subs or donors to join the game as a reward, or just let your fans join (although I wouldn't recommend that personally, lest your star player start going offside every 30 seconds). This also allows you to setup fan leagues using the previously mentioned Online Dynasty mode. We're really excited for this one as it's a really new way for content creators to engage with fans meaningfully in-game, and in a manner of speaking would enable streamers to turn into armchair league chairmen.
Wrapping Up
Okay so time to put a bow on this. That concludes pretty much everything for the first dev blog. In the future we'll have more in-progress work to show off, but I didn't want to waste time polishing things that clearly are not ready to show off yet.