Youth teams - Now the fun part begins

Hopefully, you haven't missed the fact that we're currently working on a new large addition to Virtual Manager: Youth teams.

I haven't written all that much about it here on the blog up until now, as we have been buried deep in the engine room of the game making the many heavy duty technical changes that are required for youth teams to work.

Virtual Manager has been around for almost 14 years and in all that time, every single underlying system of the game has been made with the basic premise that a player is directly linked to a club and that a club has only 1 set of facilities, vifa points, league position etc.

In order to make youth teams possible, we have had to split the direct link between clubs and players, and put in a new layer between the clubs and players - a layer that we're calling squads. In the future, players are connected to a squad and the squad is connected to a club. That way, a squad can play their own matches, have their own league standings, their own VIFA points and supporters, their own stadium, their own tactics, etc.

This split has required major changes in transfers, training, stadiums, leagues, matches, vifarank / supporter numbers, tactics, sponsorships, cups, trophies, season updates, and a ton of other places deep down in the code... It's exhausting just think about!

But, we have now come so far that Virtual Manager's engine room can handle youth teams, which means that we're now entering the much more exciting phase of development where we design pages for all the features and get the rules in place. We need to decide things like:

• How many players can a club have in each squad?
• How large can the youth team stadium be?
• How and how often do can you move players between the two squads and what impact does it have on their mood?
• How do we give you a clear overview of your two squads?
• How do we adjust the mood system to meet the requirements I wrote about in a previous blog post.
• What should youth teams look like in the league tables?
• How do we adapt the design of every page where a player appears to clearly distinguish between youth players and seniors?

I have already discussed many of these things with the crew and written about them on the blog before, but now is where things start to really take shape, so look forward to the upcoming blog posts!