Welcome to the development blog of dribbling.org - a free online football management game. This site's primary objective is to provide all of our curious friends with more or less specific details on the project. For starters, it's a good idea to read an introductory article. We also would like to discuss various game features and get your feedback on our forums. Feel free to visit them, we want to know your opinion! And come back every few days to read more about our game.

Fame

It's been a while since I posted some new details. We just had a lot of "cleaning up" and "polishing everything" duties (yes, it's that "almost done" phase which... ehm... takes forever :/ ). Recently I gradually started writing a manual, so I guess I might as well post a chapter or a part of it now and then. Let's start with the concept of fame, which basically tells you how well-known your team is among football fans.

Philosophy of Balanced Skills

The match engine, as the central part of the whole system, must be designed very carefully. Every other aspect is either directly or indirectly connected with it. With so many dependencies, it needs to be very balanced. Let's take a look at how our match engine enforces a nice balance of players' technical skills (or, in other words, how did we achieve a dynamic need for skills).

Transfers Keeping Managers Closer

What's the most noticeable aspect of massively multiplayer online games? The answer is as obvious and dumb as possible: many, many people co-exist in the same "world". While it's a great thing, it can also bring issues that are not really desired by developers and players. For example, with so many people around most of other players become simply anonymous providers of service. When you interact with them, you don't really treat them as real people, neither you feel a desire to know them better. They just buy a sword from you, sell a player to you, etc. Same happens to "in-game objects" (swords or players). They're like thousands of others identical or very similar swords and players. You got that particular one just because it was a good deal or it was on the market when you needed it. IT. Not "my beloved sword", not "Frank Bowman, my cool goalkeeper", but IT, this object that let's me hit a monster for 23-47 HP. Read this article to see how we're trying to change that.

Training

Those of you who have read my Platypus Guide (don't worry if you don't know what it is) know that I'm crazy about training. It's not hard to guess that we've put a lot of effort into designing a system that would be much better than anything we've seen so far. Same reasons stand behind the decision to bring you the basics of training at the very beginning of our dev-blog adventure :).

General Guidelines

While designing Dribbling, we constantly have to keep in mind general guidelines that we've set for ourselves. Won't this new feature give an additional advantage to wealthier teams? Is this particular way of solving training OK with our rule that says "don't make it profitable to raise one skill far higher than others"? So our General Guidelines is in fact the list of goals that we want to achieve. It's the result of years of experience with other online football management games. We know what we don't like about them and we want to avoid all those mistakes. Read the whole story and see what's important for us.

Introduction

Generally, this site is meant for experienced players of other football games. In fact, I don't really know how someone who doesn't have anything in common with such games would find his way here. Anyways, here's a brief description of the whole idea for those that don't have a clue what's going on.