A few weeks ago, The Gaffer Next was mostly a specification, a collection of ideas, and a slightly unreasonable desire to build a football management game for the ZX Spectrum Next.
Now it actually does things.
That feels like progress.
(This is an in-progress screenshot from the loading screen – recognise the manager?)
The project is a homage to One-Nil Soccer Manager, the old DOS football management game from Scottish developer New Era Software. I wanted to capture some of what made those older management games so compelling: relatively simple presentation, lots happening underneath, and that dangerous ability to make you think, “I will just play one more match.”
The important bit is that I am not trying to build Football Manager on an 8-bit machine. The aim is to build something that feels like it belongs on the Spectrum, while taking advantage of what the Next can do.
And the foundations are now starting to appear.
What is working?
The loader is complete, including a proper loading image. See above!
That might sound like a small thing, but there is something enormously satisfying about seeing a game actually load into its own title screen rather than staring at whatever temporary developer screen happens to be there.
More importantly, the competition structure is now taking shape.
Three tournament types are implemented:
- League
- Cup
- FA Cup
The game can also generate the teams needed to populate those competitions.
Underneath that, some of the less glamorous but rather important management-game machinery is appearing. There is now logic for arranging friendlies, along with the logic required to settle everything at the end of a season.
That last part is particularly significant.
A football management game is not really a collection of individual matches. It is a simulation that needs to survive the transition from August to May and then correctly turn itself back into August again.
Promotion, relegation, competition state, squads and the new season all have to remain coherent. Getting that lifecycle designed early should make everything built on top of it considerably easier.
And now there are players
The initial squad display logic is also in place.
This is where the project starts becoming noticeably more tangible.
Until this point, much of the work has been infrastructure: tournaments, teams, scheduling and season state. Necessary, but largely invisible to the person eventually playing it.
Once you can open a squad and start looking at footballers, however, it begins to feel like a management game.
The eventual idea is that the player should be able to move naturally between the high-level club view and individual footballers, seeing their value, position and abilities without drowning in information.
That simplicity is deliberate.
The old management games were remarkably good at giving you just enough information to make a decision — and then allowing you to convince yourself that signing a 34-year-old midfielder with questionable pace was somehow tactical genius.
Building the boring bits first
One thing I have deliberately resisted is immediately jumping to the glamorous parts: match graphics, transfers, tactics and all the other things that make good screenshots.
The underlying simulation needs to work first.
At the moment the rough progression looks something like:
load game → create football world → create competitions → populate teams → schedule matches → manage squads → play season → settle season → repeat
If that loop is solid, I have a foundation on which the actual management game can grow.
If it is not, I have a very attractive ZX Spectrum Next program that eventually collapses in a heap sometime around the third Saturday in February.
I have written enough software over the years to know which one I would prefer.
Still a long way to go
There is obviously plenty left to build.
The squad system needs to develop further. Player attributes and progression need to feed into matches. Transfers and finances need to become meaningful. Tactical decisions need consequences. The match engine needs to turn all of that data into believable football.
And, critically, it all needs to remain achievable within the constraints of the machine.
But the interesting milestone this week is not any individual feature.
It is that The Gaffer Next has crossed a small but important boundary.
It is no longer just a design document for a football management game.
There is now a football world being generated underneath it.
And somewhere in there, presumably, there is already a chairman preparing to sack me.
More soon.