Some fans certainly would want to come home after their team's been soundly beaten on a Saturday and give themselves a better chance of exacting revenge.
Exactly. So we try and let people do both. My favourite unlockable that we've ever done is in Classic this year. It's 'dodgy lasagne', which gives food poisoning to some of the opposition. Because that's something that happened in football, and it's something that people will have fun using. User flow is another thing we've learned about from a lot of the mobile titles, and that gave birth in a way to Classic. It had been bubbling under as an idea for a while.
It was mainly brought up by people in the studio who've had kids and didn't have time to play the full game and were turning off modules in the code, but then ruining the experience for themselves because those modules were really important to the rest of the game. Classic was all about working out a way to turn those modules off and not have a negative effect on the game.
But a lot of the free-to-play titles really make me think. Rather than necessarily being inspiration for the game as such, like taking particular features [from them], they do sharpen my brain up a little late at night, which is when I do most of my feature idea work.
A quick burst on one of the early PopCap games does the trick, or at the moment [match-three-puzzler] Best Fiends – thankfully I've just done level 80, because if I hadn't Football Manager would probably have been put back this year. But we also look at things like the loops in games like Tiny Tower. There are really interesting mechanics to learn from [that kind of game] – sometimes we find we overcomplicate things a bit. And if we see people doing it in a simpler manner, we will try to simplify things.
Your development process often involves scheduling content years in advance. How many ideas do you have to shelve or postpone because of fluctuations in the sport, or simply because of time constraints?
Well, this year is a perfect example. I put together my dream feature set and it then goes to the programmers to estimate how long everything's going to be. This year, it was over twice the time that we had, so a lot of stuff got moved across. It's difficult when you're doing a jigsaw puzzle to literally take half that puzzle and put it somewhere else, because it's not as simple as just cutting it down the middle, it's about trying to balance all of that stuff out. But this will actually be the first year that we don't have feature meetings, because we don't need to.
When we went through the Football Manager 15 [feature plan], and all the real-world stuff we had to add and made the cuts from there, I effectively split the game into two volumes. So we already have a full feature set for Football Manager 16 [planned].
There are 30 or 40 things that have come up during the year – either things that have happened in real life this year that we want to make sure are in there, or things we know are going to happen next year that still need to be added to the schedule. But we're not going to [follow] our normal practice of one month sitting in a room from 11am till 6pm going through ideas. We're actually going to spend that extra month doing more development work, which is the first time we've ever been able to do that as a studio.
Obviously, there will be other things that come up during the year and those things get added and other things get cut. Around March or April time, I have to do a cull – I call it genocide – and it's the process that I like the least, because I've got used to the idea of features being in. There are times when my toys absolutely go out of the pram, when someone says, "Sorry, we're not going to have time to do this," and I'll say, "Why didn't you do that as the first feature?" and then they turn around and say, "It's because you said I had to do these other six first," and I have to apologise. People are used to it now – the me-getting-angry phase is when we're doing the feature cutting.
Surely the idea has been floated of Football Manager becoming a game as a service. Could you see that happening in the future, or do you think the type of game it is means it's still better suited to an annual release schedule?
At the moment, we've got Football Manager on PC, Mac and Linux; we have Classic on PC, Mac and Linux and last year on Vita; we've got Handheld on iOS and Android; and we will have Football Manager Online coming next year in Korea. If we were doing games as a service, the only way that would work for me is if there was cross- interoperability between all the different platforms. And the Steam Store doesn't talk to the App Store, which doesn't talk to Google Play, and so on.
So it isn't [currently] possible because of business models. If that changes, then maybe. It's something that I'd love to do, because if someone buys Football Manager, I'd love to give them a discount on Handheld, I'd love to give them a discount on the documentary that we just released. But we can't because they're sold in different stores by different people.
