Project timeline and team structure

Hi everyone!

During the last weeks we have already told you a lot about goalunited next. The main goal in the new version is the extension to more platforms that can be used to play goalunited. With that we will react to the ongoing movement away from the PC, towards tablets. The special challenge for us here is to create a UI that can be controlled with a mouse, and with a finger as needed for tablets.

We also want to use the chance to eliminate conceptual weaknesses that have found their way into goalunited during the last years and technical improvements that will lead to a better overall performance.

This extensive task will take quite some time due to its size and complexity. It is not possible yet to give the exact release date. It will depend on the achieved quality of the development. And it is of course essential that we reach a feature state that allows the complete management of your club as before and that those features are fully functional, both from a conceptual and technical standpoint.

With everything the project duration for gu next is estimated at 1200 developer days. This means, that ONE developer would need this amount of days to complete the project. Currently there are three developers working on gu next full-time. We are planning on doubling that number in the next few weeks. This means that we will have to hire a few additional developers. We hope that we will be successful in doing so rather quickly, even in this highly competitive area.

With six developers working on gu next full-time, we should be able to complete the development in April 2014 (Feature-complete: Alpha-status). At that point we will test and improve the quality in a fully playable Closed-Beta version. For this we will pick a few managers to help us run extensive tests on the Closed-Beta. Once the version is stable and we are happy with the quality, we will offer all managers the chance to check out the new version in an Open-Beta.

We hope to get a few tens of thousands of managers to help us run some load tests on the Open-Beta. With those we want to make sure that the performance enhancements are adequate.

After all this, we will integrate this well-tested “goalunited next” version into the running goalunited 2014 version. This should happen in the summer of 2014. You will then see the changes in the look & feel, navigation and gameplay, but your players and clubs will stay untouched.

Once the new browser version is running stable and smoothly, and after we have completed all final adjustments, we will concentrate on the release of the tablet app. We will offer an app both for Android and IOS, but at this point we do not know yet which one will be published first.

To clean up as big a project as goalunited, to improve it and to move it to cross-platform is an extremely complex and big planning and developing task. To be able to complete it within the year we are planning with, it takes a strong team that puts every effort and a lot of heart into it.

In the following we want to show you our team structure, and give you some insights into who is currently working on goalunited and what their individual responsibilities are.

Development Team

goalunited next

Felix (Lead Software Developer „Development“):  Frontend/Backend development, Scrum-Process

Daniel (Software Developer): Frontend/Backend development

Konrad (Software Developer): Frontend development

goalunited 2013

Sharam (Lead Software Developer „Maintenance “): Backend development, 

Simon (Software Developer): Frontend/Backend development

Graphics

Ali (Art Director): responsible for the assets design; Art team coordination

Sebastian (2D-Artist): new employees; new mentor and further assets

Jan (2D-Artist): new player faces and further assets 

Supported by:  Martin and Tjark (3D-Artists)

System

Gregor (Lead System Administrator): Setting up the goalunited server cluster and keeping it running smoothly!

Stefan (System Administrator): Having Gregor's back!

Concept Team

Game Design

Renke (Game Designer): balancing; match engine and other game mechanics; basic and detailed concepts

User Interface (UI)/User Experience (UX)

Eva (UX-Designer): conception of the user experience and the screen composition

Valentin (UI-Designer): designing the Look & Feel of the new interface

Starting today: Eric (UI-Designer): also designing the Look & Feel of the new interface

Product Team

Robert (Product Manager): in charge of news & user communication; GU 2013 producing; bug management; live-game related issues

Yvonne (Costumer Service Team Manager): in charge of the international support teams; localisation; news & user Communication; facebook

Tobias (QA Admin): GU 2013 beta quality insurance; bug management

Jules (Game Director): Vision-Keeper goalunited (Product owner); monetisation; GU next producing; product budgeting

And of course, last but not least, our international Admins for each country and their devoted volunteer teams of supporters, moderators and translators.

Now, to sum it up:

6 developers, feature-complete in April 2014, beta (closed & open) in the summer, browser version release as soon as desired quality is established. Apps for tablets follow next.

And in the end we want to pick up a topic that has been discussed a lot in our forums in the last weeks. In the home/profile screens we have used a trophy picture that shows a non-existent standard trophy. This trophy is just a placeholder and is used to create realistic screens without spending too much time on details. The earned trophies will stay untouched and will be presentable in an impressive slide-show.  

Regards,

Jules (Game Director)

Coming up next: Community questions and poll!

Formations, Positions, Match Engine

Hello everyone!

Today we are looking at the heart and soul of goalunited: the match engine; and to be more precise, the formations.

The goalunited match engine considers many big and small details about your clubs, players and the set line-ups. Everything has an effect, and with luck, can lead to the deciding chance. It is our clear intention that it is not always the stronger team that wins a match, with the right tactic and a little luck the weaker team always has a chance even against a clear favourite. As a result of the high complexity of the match engine every change that is implemented can have an effect on many other areas of the game, and are never trivial.

We will use the GU next update to perform a few long planned changes to the line-up and formation system and the match engine. Here we will also take into consideration many suggestions from the community, like the request to make wing players more important, as well as to allow them to play on the complete sides on the field, including the defence.

Next to the upvaluing of the wing players we put great emphasis to allow more realistic formations and to remove oddities of the match engine.

Formations

In the current system each possible position on the field has an individual weighing of the player skills. This varies slightly from position to position. The disadvantage of this system is that there are many positions on which most of the players with “normal-weighted” skills cannot perform up to their full potential. Many realistic standard formations are therefore not easily manned.

Another reason for us to rethink the current system is to make it more “newbie-friendly”: Many new managers are overwhelmed by the vast number of variations in the positioning, especially since the advantages and disadvantages are hard to grasp for a beginner.

In short: in the future it will not be possible anymore to simply position your players on the field any way you want. Instead we will offer you 20+ fixed formations that are unlocked through the manager career system. These will include standard formations like 4-4-2 and 3-4-3, but also more complex and challenging formations. In the standard formations all players with “normal-weighted” skills can play up to their full potential, in the more challenging formations players with specialized training and repositioning will stand out.

The strategic possibilities that result from the perfect combinations of players, formation, tactic and marking will stay unaffected. You will be able to find at least one formation for every situation and even more important, you will be able to place your players more efficiently.

Ill.: Selection of the formation in the line-up screen (work in progress!)

When a formation is selected the best 11 players will automatically be placed on the field, alternatively the players you had placed on the field are repositioned as possible.

Position strength

The coloured bar indicating the position suitability will be replaced by the position strength. With this you will be able to see the true strength of the players on their current positions. The player strength shown in the player file and squad overview will, as always, show the ideal strength for the assigned (standard) position.

Every position in each available formation will have an individual skill weighing and be therefore suitable for a specific player type. In some formations there will also be positions that can be played on by one of two player types without penalty (like wing player and defender).

Wing players

Wing players, which until now seemed to be disadvantaged, will be more diversely usable with the new formations. Until now it seemed as if wing players trained slower; that was not the case though and only appeared that way because wing players train a wider range of skills. That however, is currently not taken into consideration appropriately for the player strength calculation. This will also be adjusted so that the values become comparable.

These changes might seem radical and give the impression that we are removing an important feature, but don’t panic!

• You will have thousands of line-up combinations with formations, tactics, players and   marking.
• There will be no more unrealistic and weird formations.
• Your players will be able to use their skills more efficiently.
• Setting line-ups will be more comfortable and more transparent.
• The match engine will be optimized in many aspects

And last but not least an important pointer: If you do not have any good wing players in your team yet, now might be a good time to start looking for good talents and to start promoting them.

Best regards,

Renke (Game Designer)

Coming up next: project timeline and team introduction

Designing the goalunited "next" User Experience

Hey everyone!

It’s been a while since the last entry, but today we will give you more insight on what the new design and restructuring looks like in detail.

Before digging into the topic, I’d like to introduce myself. My name is Eva and I am the User Experience Designer at northworks, the goalunited developer. In the following, I want to show you why and in which way things are redesigned from the User Experience Design point of view, based on some examples.

Requirements and Challenges

First of all, “goalunited next” is a cross platform game, which will be available for browser and tablets. Although the focus lies on browser, we build only one design for both platforms. This arouses many challenges:

•    Client needs to be scalable due to different solutions
•   Design is not tied to the platform
•   Game is complex and has a lot of content on every screen
•   Recycling of components, in order to gain speed in production
•    Keeping corporate identity in mind, since the brand “goalunited” is the same

We also had the task to innovate the whole look and feel of the game to reach a very high level of quality, in order to be competitive with other Football Manager games. The game “goalunited” is round about 7 years old and has grown so much that it was time to restructure the features and give it a new color.

Additionally, we decided to move more to an adult appearance, away from the cartoony icons and buttons. The clean and bright look helps to focus on the important areas and orientate more easily.

The left extract shows the tablet navigation (simple swipe to the left or right).
The right extract shows the browser version, where you can either drag the slider element, click on the page dots or use the arrows at the left and right end to step through the slides.
(Still work in progress) 

Layout Redesign

Of course we know that you like the current design, but when examining “goalunited 2013” more closely, we learned that some things needed to be improved. The everyday click paths are unnecessarily complicated and the tutorial isn’t that user-centered. It doesn’t really give you a full view of the upcoming game and is lacking attractive mid- and long-term goals. Many screens are not as intuitive as they could be and some features are too hidden without reason, not allowing you to plan strategic, like the locked buildings on the playfield for example.

In many cases it helped to change the appearance to make it more playful, e.g. the trophies. The achievements will get a whole new look and feel to them and lose their rather standard tabular form. 

This is the popup that opens when clicking on the trophy container on the home screen. We added more to it, like the rarity indicator and also visually enhanced it to make it more rewarding. (Work in progress)


There are also some things that are added to existing features in more than one way. The match display on the top of the screen will not only show you the next or currently running match, but also the level of the opponent or his strength as an alternative option.

More important is the fact that the match itself can be swiped left to see the next 2 upcoming matches where you will be able to click on the context-sensitive button to adjust the line-up. Swiping it to the right will reveal the last 2 matches with a button to read the according report. (Work in progress)

Accessibility and Transparency

As part of the restructuring to improve your click paths towards smoother navigation and more comfortable daily sessions, we want to achieve a level of transparency to show also new players more easily what will await them after the tutorial and later throughout the game via a new quest and event system. This is not only interesting for new players, but also for those of you who play “goalunited” already.

The current game does not introduce all the feature details to you, which is why some of them are only known by few players. Therefore a quest based tutorial will be built, which guides you more efficient on the one side, while granting you a little more freedom in terms of fewer restrictions on the other side. Since I am no friend of arrows, blocked areas and inactive buttons, I rather want to urge everyone to be curious and explore. Doing so, you will get a really good picture of what can be unlocked or done, together with the information of how to do so.

This tutorial isn’t like other tutorials, which end at one point or sometimes can be skipped. We want to expand this over the whole game, meaning that the mentor appears, whenever something new is unlocked or we decided to bring in a new feature.

In combination with the new event system there will be more transparency about what’s going on and especially what had happened during your absence when returning to the game. (Work in progress)

This kind of event system is very important to keep an eye on everything a lot easier and also stay on track by tackling the incoming issues immediately. You will get informed about finished building jobs, nearly ending contracts, general hints and advice and many 

more.

New Features

Due to the restructuring, a whole series of new ideas for features and general improvements will be realized, which came from many of you in the community and the goalunited team as well.

Despite from the new quest and event system, we decided to give all players more freedom, when it comes to customization for example.

In “goalunited next” everyone will be able to individualize his or her own logo with colors and shapes. Uploading an own logo will still be an alternative option. (Work in progress)

All other improvements will be revealed and introduced to you during the production. Thanks for taking your time to learn more about the major redesign and its background. We hope that you like the direction “goalunited next” is heading to and count on your support.

So stay tuned for future enhancements!

Cheers,

Eva

Coming up next:  
Formations, Positions, Matchengine