Devlog January 2026
02. February 2026
January was intense with a lots of refactoring of the game. While a lot changed behind the scenes, the game itself did not change much. Yet the game has now less bugs and crashes.
v0.6.0 with breaking changes
The only version of January breaks a lot of things and all save games and settings are lost. I'm really hope that I did not cause too much troubles with this changes. This refactoring was needed and since so much changes, migrating files would has been too difficult. At least I haven't broken the monthly updates promise, by releasing it the last day of January ;-)
You can find all detailed changes in the releases page on Codeberg.
Everything is a csv file
Now all files (save games, settings...) are saved as csv files and can be easily inspected. Having a unified file format makes it easier for future data migrations. All csv files also have headers now, so it can be easily seen what data a value represents.
There's a running joke, that many sport management games are just spreadsheet simulators. Well, this game is it now for real!
ECS like data structure
The data is now structured in a Entity Component System way. It is not a real ECS, but I think it comes really close to it.
Initially the game had a hierarchical data structure:
world -> continents -> nation -> league -> teams -> players
But this structure makes it really difficult to lookup values, such as players. To do that I have to iterate over the whole hierarchy. I partially solved this by saving some "indexes" for every player, to be faster. That allow to directly find players, by looking up the team/league/nation he was playing. Of course this was more than a quick hack than a real solution. This indexes had to be updated manually, every time a player moved team.
Now I save all data flat inside a dictionary, with a unique id as key. To connect a player to a team, I save the team id to the player and the player id to the team. This still needs some manual work, but is much easier to maintain and to debug. Data loading and saving is also much easier and more direct now. I really hope this refactoring will pay off and make future development easier and less error prone.
In-game data editor development started
With this update I had to disable the ability to create and load custom players csv files. I would have to adapt this to the new data structure, but it is not worth the effort imo. I started to develop the editor, that allows to create custom databases directly in-game. So it makes more sense put my focus on the tool that will replace custom players csv files.
I hope to ship the first version of the in-game editor the next months. There it will be possible to choose which leagues and teams are activated. Future releases will extend the editor to allow also player changes. The final version instead should also be able to edit competition rules and more.
New language: Chinese (Simplified Han script)
The whole game is now playable also in Chinese! It really warms my heart to see people from all over the world translating the game. I had to add an additional font for Chinese characters. This increases the download size of the game by nearly 16MB, the exact file size of the font. So if you wonder why the update size is so big this time, it's the new packed font.
Thanks to all translations contributors on Weblate, you are the best!
Free Steam key giveaways
To increase the visibility of all official channels, the first Steam giveaway will happen today! At 19:00 GMT time, free Steam keys will be posted everywhere. The last character will be missing, so the first to guess the right character will get the game.
Here are the links to all social channels, where the giveaways will happen
Every feedback is welcome
Feel free to write me an email at info@99managers.org and comment on Mastodon.
