Posts about Basketball
Hi all,
I'm the dev of Basketball GM. You may know me from making a post here every offseason since 2013. Then again, a lot of you nephews were probably not born in 2013, so if this is new to you...
Basketball GM (BBGM) is a single-player sports management sim game. You are the GM and your job is to assemble the best team you can without losing too much money. It's kind of a sandbox game, you can play it how you want. Want to start with the current rosters and just sim a few years before things start to get too different? Go for it. Want to sim thousands of seasons into the future and see who the real GOAT is? No problem. And there are tons of settings to play around with.
My goal is for BBGM to be pretty simple to play (not a lot of required micromanagement) but with a lot of depth in terms of the UI and analysis tools available to you. Basically, I want it to have the detail you get in real life from basketball-reference.com and other sites, without making the actual gameplay so complicated that you can't figure out how it works.
Oh, and it's free. No microtransactions or anything like that. And it runs in your web browser, so it works on any device - mobile, Mac, PC, whatever.
Another cool thing about BBGM is that I'm constantly working on it it. There are typically multiple updates every week. Some of the improvements since the last time I posted here are:
Keeping up with league changes: Added the play-in tournament, the semifinals MVP award, and continually updated the rosters.
Fun stuff: New achievements, new frivolities, and All-Star weekend events. The slam dunk contest is my favorite. Just for fun, you get to pick the dunks attempted by players on your team. And the AI players are smart! They will calibrate the difficulty of their dunk based on what they need to advance.
Customization and God Mode: Customize the All-Star game, country flags, playoff teams, draft lottery odds, default league settings, tragic deaths, force ties, and more. Also, related to the custom draft lottery odds, I took my code to generate different lottery probabilities and put it in a fun little standalone site that you can use to see how lottery odds in various pro leagues have changed over time, or design your own.
Performance: I want BBGM to run just as fast in your 1000th season as it does in your 1st season, and this year there have been several updates aimed at improving UI performance and simulation performance. Also, it is finally possible to export very large leagues and there is built-in Dropbox integration.
Realism: Players act differently when they're in foul trouble, some teams play better or worse in the playoffs, and star players are more likely to retire a bit earlier, rather than sticking around for a very long time as role players.
User interface: Way too many improvements here to list, but here's a few: more league leaders pages, summed stats for traded players, draft class summary, new trading block UI, ctrl+k menu, scrollable score bar, season preview, matchup box redesign, and a ton more.
A brand new game: In addition to football and hockey versions, there is now baseball too! All games are made from the same integrated codebase, so they all get new features at the same time.
If you give it a try, please let me know how you like it, either here or on r/BasketballGM! I try my best to listen to feedback - many of the features listed above were suggested by users. And if you really want to go crazy, here's the source code on GitHub, maybe you can get involved there too :)