Update from the dev department

It's been a while since my last blog post, but it's not because we've been slacking.

Right now we are buried in the development of youth teams. We are still working deep down in the engine room of the game, so we don't yet have a whole lot of gameplay to show off. However, I have a bit of video showing how we have added the youth team's stadium to the editor, right next to your main stadium.

Full steam ahead

Last week we finally got the figures we've been waiting for: the financial results for August, which was the first full calendar month since we adjusted our prices.

And the result is really good. We now have a lot more resources to throw around and they're going to be spent securing the future of Virtualmanager.

To begin with, we have made a deal with our freelance developer to buy 100 extra hours over the next 2 months! All of his time will be spent on the development of youth teams.

In addition, we can now better afford to advertise the game. In a previous post, I explained the challenges we have had with advertising because we are in a bidding war with the game mastodons, who rake in tons of cash from each individual user. With the price changes, the numbers look a little better for us, so now we can actually afford paying more for advertising.

We have also contracted our parent company's in-house graphic designer who is currently working on a refresh of the design of our store. We have been notified by our payment service provider that we have until November 1st to switch over our current payment implementation to their new payment system - so since while we're chopping and changing in the shop, we might as well give the design and user experience an update.

The future

As you know, right now the youth teams feature is our main focus.

The plan is that once we have released version 1 of youth teams, we will spend 1-2 months correcting, refining and expanding the feature - exactly like we did with the new scout.

In order for youth teams to be the fun and exciting addition to the game that we want it to be, we will need to get lot of managers playing with it and providing feedback and ideas that we can continuously implement.

Once the youth team feature is done, we will move on quickly to the next development task, and there are plenty of them to tackle.

Part of the extra revenue we have gained from the price adjustments will be set aside to fund the development of a much better gaming experience on mobile. This is an area where we have to admit that we have fallen behind and it is becoming increasingly urgent that we get better mobile support.

We're not yet so far in our planning that we can say whether it will take the form of an actual native mobile app, or if it will be a new responsive design that will make the website automatically adjust to mobile screen sizes.

We also haven't decided whether we will start this task immediately after youth teams or if there are other features that need to be implemented first - because there are lots of exciting ideas on the drawing board.

So the future looks bright. I am extremely pleased that we now have significantly more development resources and can implement some of the many ideas we have long wanted to implement.