Devlog November 2025

01. December 2025

This month the game was finally released on Steam as Early Access on 7th of November! It was a historical moment for me, to release my first commercial game. I also attended two conferences and sent my first funding proposal.

My first sales

At the time of writing I sold 51 copies of the game on Steam. This is surely not enough to be able to live from game development (yet). But I'm still very happy with the results! 51 people buying something I created feels good and shows that the game has potential.

9 of those sold copies have been refunded, that makes a ~20% refund rate. The refund reasons are the following

• 6 Not fun
• 2 Purchased by accident
• 1 Other issues

After searching online, having around 10% refund is normal. Everything above means that there might be issues with the game. This of course depends highly on different factors, such as the price and quality of the game. Games that cost just a few Euros get much less refunds. My game is sold for 10€ and at the current state, this might feel too much. If I could go back, I would follow the advice I got. Start with a smaller price and gradually increase it, when more features are added.

Anyway my game is quite unique, being also Open Source and available for free on other platforms. There are not many doing this and it can be difficult to compare stats with other proprietary games. Next time I will consider starting with a lower price.

Not fun yet

The refund data clearly shows that the game is not really fun yet. I will work on this feedback for the next updates and hope to improve it, update by update. The player transfers where broken at first release and did not always work as expected. This has been fixed by now, but it is still too easy to buy players. As a third league team, you can buy top class players on first try. Additionally the match engine is still not really fun. Player and ball movements feel unnatural and the user has little influence on the final result.

Transfers and matches are the core of manager games, all the rest is just keeping the ship afloat. So I really have to improve this two parts of the game, to make it finally fun. I plan to improve the in-game economy and transfer logic, to make it more realistic. This includes also improvements on the UI of all transfer related tasks. On the match engine side, I hope to add the first tactics to the game. This makes the player feel more involved and not just a passive observer of random results.

v0.5.0 to v0.5.3

This month I released 4 updates that improved the stability of the game. Notable improvements are related to transfers and the match engine. You can find all changes in the releases page on Codeberg.

Transfer fixes

Transfers work now correctly and the biggest issues where related to wrong saving/loading of them. Implementing transfer logic is much harder than expected and caused several issues over time. Anyways, every version brings a better experience.

New movements logic

The latest update improved also a lot the match engine performance and stability. The ball and players movements are now pre-calculated and that makes everything much easier. Instead of letting the ball move autonomously and having to check for collisions every few milliseconds, the engine calculates already the final destination of the ball. Now the engine already knows if a shot leads to a goal or a save, even before the shot starts. This allows now also to let all state machines run at the same ticks per second. Previously there was a more frequent update loop for collision detection and movements.
Also player attributes are now easier to take in consideration, while calculating the results. When a player shots, it's shooting ability gets compared with the goalkeeper ability. Both influence the final outcome.

New translation contributors

The project got also new translation contributors. Especially for Portuguese (Brazil) and French, now both translated over 90%. Thanks a lot to all previous and new contributors!

SFSCON 25

On 7 and 8 November I attend the yearly SFSCON in Bolzano (Italy). This year my talk about the game got approved. I really enjoyed getting to know nice people and getting new FSFE merchandise. I have now also red socks that show, that I love Free Software <3. I hope to present now yearly updates of the game at the conference. Maybe next year I can fully release the game on stage!

GodotFest 25

This month I also attended the GodotFest in Munich (Germany), my very first game development conference. I got to know a lot of nice people from all over the world, that all have one thing in common: Creating games with the Godot Engine.

I was surprised that there where many hobby developers, making it really accessible to everybody. I expected more business oriented folks, but was immediately proven wrong. Hands down, this was the best conference I attended so far, sorry SFSCON and FOSDEM ;-) Every talk interested me and I could talk with everybody about what cool things they are working on.

It was also the first time I showcased my game in the public. While nearly nobody knew what Futsal is, I still got good feedback and saw what needs to be changed. I think I was the only one showcasing an Open Source game and nearly all where very surprised. I guess FOSS games are still a rarity, even at a conference of a MIT licensed game engine.

See you all again at GodotFest 26!

FOSDEM 26

This month I also made a talk proposal for the Gaming and VR devroom at FOSDEM 2026.

Last time I attended FOSDEM was 2024 and I really missed the games devrooms I remember from 2017. FOSDEM 2017 was the first time I saw the Godot Engine and little I knew how things will evolve.
I really hope my talk titled "99Managers - A libre sports management game made with the Godot Engine" get accepted. This conference could be a great place to find new contributors and share ideas and knowledge.

I really think that I might go anyways, even if my talk does not get accepted. It would be great to meet people that contribute to the Open Source games ecosystem. The positive experience at GodotFest motivates me a lot. And who knows, FOSDEM + Games devroom might even beat GodotFest(?)

NGI Zero Commons Funding

Today was the deadline for proposals at the NGI Zero Commons Fund. Last year I was already tempted to propose my game, but if I remember right, the form was bigger. Also the game felt not really ready for such funding at the time.
But this year I just had to answer 5 questions, with a few thousand words and done. So I made a proposal to get funding the development for the next year and probably beyond.

I really hope the proposal get's accepted, because it would allow me to focus 100% on the game. Currently the game is fully self funded with my savings. Without funding or a increase in sales, I have to do some freelance work again. This was already planned and expected, because making a successful is really hard. But it would be really cool if I can continue another year working full time on a FOSS game.

This could be huge for the Open Source gaming world and show that games can be built and funded openly. Let's see how things turn out, anyways the game will continue to get updates and improve over time.

Back to development

This month was full of conferences, paper work and exciting days where I couldn't really focus. I hope during December I'm able to fully dedicate my time to the development of the game.
You can expect at least one update this month and maybe the game gets a bit more fun already :-)

Every feedback is welcome

Feel free to write me an email at info@99managers.org and comment on Mastodon.