You are the GM of a team. You play against 31 other players in a professional league. You sign free agents, draft players, deal with injuries, choose plays for your team to run, when you want. Every real day, is a game "week" so you play a game a day, unless it's the offseason.
You have a salary cap you have to deal with. Trade with other human players. Try to win the Championship.
A season lasts a real time month from start to finish. The players are all fake, they grow up. They make pro bowls, and try to make the hall of fame.
We have leagues that have run over 70 seasons at this point.
You are correct. There is no visualization for what happens, but there are summaries (box score) and play by play data.. long text file with lots of details for hardcore fans.
If you're not a huge football fan, it will be an over complicated mess to you, in all honesty.
It's a hardcore game. I've been trying to make it easier, but given the difficulties in the engine (vb6 and classic asp), it's been difficult to create a structure that makes sense. Plus as a hardcore fan, I have a lot of blindness on how to make it easier.
I really relate to everything he said in his documentary. Do you rewrite tons of work? Do you re platform? Tons of issues.
It was started in 2004, so that's a lot of old crud and bad coding.
The community helps some times with javascript plugins, and sometimes full windows utilities to make all the data easier to take in, but it's still a mess.
I need to figure out ultimately what I want to do with it, but it's a fun game, a good premise, there are other competitors with similar challenges. I don't know... :)
I will start trying to reframe it in my mind as a garden. That sounds much nicer :)
I think 500 people right now play my game, and if anything that makes the weight of it all larger.