After a few years of developing Passhoot has finally been launched!
Hobby
It all started as a hobby. Initially developing a soccer manager match engine using all kinds of player strengths to calculate positioning, actions and how those actions affect a match.
iPad app
When the match engine calculated realistic statistics and results the next step was to build a user interface. A few years ago we decided to build an iPad app, since the soccer players have a lot of details which can be managed and the screen on the iPad makes game play easier.
Setup
In the app first displaying a team, the players and the team’s setup was added. Changing the setup and customizing every position and focus was making the difference in winning or losing with a given team.
Training
The next module to focus on was adding the ability to improve players. Since each soccer player has a lot of strengths, the ability to train those strengths was the next step in increasing the performance of the team.
We focused on making the training module fun to play with displaying actual improvements for each player. Dragging an exercise on the training field, assigning a trainer and chose the players for the exercise shows the usual decisions you make.
To make things easy and avoid having to spend a lot of time managing the training, the repeat option to run an existing exercise again was added.
Trainers
More training exercises were added and since a trainer is assigned to an exercise, enlarging the available types of exercises was added using the trainer.
A trainer will get overall experience and once he increases a higher level a new exercise can be learned. Each trainer can get a collection of exercises he has learnt.
In addition to the overall experience a trainer can also get specific exercise experience, which will result in more player improvement when giving the exercise.
Transfer market
Since a soccer player has all kinds of strengths the transfer market has been setup with actual scouts. Scouting a player to have a preview of the strengths adds a realistic touch and makes looking for some new improvements fun.
Combined with transfer bid and contract negotiations the transfer market adds some nice game play. In addition to improving players through training managers can also focus on the transfer market for buying and selling to get more income.
Finally launched
After developing for a few years and this year testing it with a small audience, the app is finally launched. What started as a hobby became a dream and now the dream is reality!
What next…
First of all, we want to see which managers like playing the game.
We will make improvements to the game play and we will add more features, since we still have some new and exciting ideas…