Devlog September 2025

30. September 2025

This month I mainly focused on fixing bugs and polishing the UI of the game. The Steam Next fest is coming soon and the game needs to be stable and look nice(r) for that.

7th of November Early Access release

While writing this devlog, I nearly forgot about the biggest news this month: The game will enter Early Access on the 7th of November!!!
I'm really excited and looking forward to sell my very first copy of a game. (If someone buys it, of course)

The game will cost 10$, with regional price adaptations, Steam usually has. It will stay free on other platforms, but the Demo version on Steam will probably be removed, once the game enters Early Access. The demo is currently the full version of the game, and I'm afraid of disappointment when people see that the paid Early Access version is the same as the free Demo.
I could release a limited Demo, but I hope people realize that the game is Open Source and that they can try the full game elsewhere for free, before buying it.
I tried to write that in the Steam description, but Steam policies do not allow links or promotions of other stores on their platform. So I had to remove that part, which also explains why other FOSS games don't have that either.

I chose the 7th of November randomly a few months ago, by simply postponing the date again and again. But this time the game is ready and also Football Manager 26 will be released on the 4th of November. This means a lot of players will head to the Football Simulation category on Steam, potentially finding my game.
This momentum could increase the numbers, or at least I hope so :-).

New beta versions v0.4.1 and v0.4.2

Two new beta versions have been released in September. The latest beta version is v0.4.2. They fixed some bugs and improved the design and UI, as usual.

There will be at least one other version before the Steam Next Fest on the 13th of October. I hope, that many players play my game during the Festival.

Future version will now also show the changelog, when launching the game. That makes it easier to understand that a new version is played and what changed. The only issue could be that the changelog will be available in English only.

The Demo in numbers

The demo is now live since the 10th of September, that makes 20 days in total as of today. The numbers are great and I didn't expect so many users to add the demo to their Steam library.

In total 886 added the game to their library and 106 actually played the game. The most happened the very first day with 477 library additions but only 11 players, and 20 players the second day. This shows how important the first day of the demo is.
Afterwards the numbers declined and now I have around 10 library additions per day.

Two players played for over 120 minutes, that is amazing! The median play time instead is 9 minutes. Surprisingly people around the whole world played the demo. I expected most players to be from Portugal, Brazil or Spain, the main countries of Futsal.

I also got my very first Steam review, with some bugs reported and good feedback! I guess it was worth creating a dedicated Steam page for the demo, for this exact reason.

Contributors guideline

I created a Contributors guideline that should cover most questions a potential contributor might have. It also defines some rules like code style, the (non) use of AI and third party dependencies (that currently are not allowed).

The curl projects contributors guideline was used as base for this. Many thanks to the curl project!

Bugs info page

There is now a new bugs page, where information on how to report bugs can be found. I hope this improves the user experience on how and where to submit bug-reports and feedback. Especially for people who don't know how to create issues on git forge platforms, like Codeberg.

Who knows, maybe someone will even fix some bug and becomes the first code contributor :-)

Steam Cloud sync not working

I tried to sync the game between my Linux Steam client and the Windows Virtual Machine, but without success.
The Steam Cloud sync is currently not working and is more complicated than expected. I wrongly assumed that simply pointing to the correct path was enough.

The progress on this issue can be followed on Codeberg.

Every feedback is welcome

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