Hey guys, I know it's been really quiet from me for a while.
No, I haven't given up on the game! I've actually spent the last several weeks redesigning the match engine and commentary playback system.
I can't even begin to tell you how much work has gone into the game in the last few weeks. Materially there's a little bit more polish (as you'll see from the screenshots and videos below) but under the hood, the amount of changes made have been phenomenal!
I alluded to it earlier in the conversation with CMV in the Discord that this is really the most critical part of the game... paradoxically just like in real life, sometimes "matches" aren't the most important part of wrestling but if there's a botch or something goes wrong - people notice!
So I wanted you guys to be able to book matches, angles etc and the engine faithfully simulates what you booked. I wanted you to be able to fast forward through shit you didn't want to sit through, but at the same time, enjoy the booking of key segments and and big moments.
Most importantly, unlike other booking games - I didn't want the segments to be repetitive. Each one has to be fresh and organically generated.
Some games have tried to cheat and connect to an LLM but I don't think the results are good and also I don't think anyone wants to sign up for an OpenAI/Claude subscription and connect that to their game even if the API calls are cheap. Nobody wants to "pay as you go" for games.
Instead I've tried to make the magic happen locally on your machine without demanding high performance hardware.
Here's how the new system works:
- Events are generated in real time. Which means the match engine takes into account the crowd mood and tension, the wrestler stamina and and a multitude of other variables to decide what happens next. If you put a flashy wrestler in the ring, he'll try to pull of riskier moves - which will pop the crowd as long as the other guy call sell them well. Getting the crowd invested is important and you can bark orders from gorilla to change how a match works. The lines are pulled from a huge corpus of data (currently 80MB) and that means every segment or match is unique.
- I've designed over 300+ matches, interviews and angles - from bikini contests to kidnappings! Every single angle from EWR is included and it's easy to create your own angles. More importantly, now the UI is in place so you can book all of these segments as well...
- I've fine tuned the system so the engine keeps up with your hardware. The renderer will never get too far behind the match engine. This means you can fast forward through a filler match or watch a key moment at a slower pace and there will be no lag, no slow downs etc. Whether you're playing this on a super gaming rig or a old laptop - it should theoretically perform well.
Here's a few examples of some play back from the game:
(1) This is the entrance sequence of Hogan vs Sting.
It's not perfect yet. I need to fix things like pronouns. Sometimes the match engine chooses pbp/color lines instead of action or it chooses the wrong lines but you get the overall shape of the entrances:
(2) This is an angle where "Woman" flirts with Macho Man and Flair runs in
Again not perfect because it didn't find the right line where Macho attacks (there's reaction lines from Tony Schavione and Bobby Heenan). But otherwise if you read the commentary it really does sound like Macho is sitting there, she comes up to flirt with him, Flair gets jealous and wades in!
Anyway the reason I'm posting at this stage is that even though it's not good enough to release yet - I've reached a really big milestone. I've finished building the system, it's now just about fine-tuning it so that when you get your hands on it, the commentary seems magical. If you've seen the last build, this is one of the last few pieces before I have a working demo of the game.
The idea that you can now book two people having a contract signing, give the segment a purpose and it plays out with everything you've booked (interruptions, run-ins etc) was my target and I'm so ecstatic to finally reach this goal. I hope this along with all the other features in the game like the business model come together to make this the most interesting booking game available.
Remember this game is totally free: I'm not charging you a cent or developing it under some "early access" shenanigans so I can slowly refine it once I've got your money!
I've had people in the last few weeks DM me to offer to pay for the game. I really appreciate this but the way I've decided to build this game is a benefit to me. Developing it under my own resources means there's an internal pressure on me to make this a game people want to play. To make it the best possible game it can be.
If I took money for it, that urgency would go away and the game wouldn't have the same amount of love and passion that's gone into it. So thanks for the offers, but if you really want to help me... keep your eyes out for the next release, test the damn thing and give me as much feedback as you possibly can!
That's what I really need from you guys when I announce the next release... which will now be a matter of days or a couple of weeks at the latest!
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