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In the autumn it’s time again for what I – well, all of us – think is the most fun: developing and improving the core game. This time we’ll not just improve game ratings or any other feedback in the game, we’ll work with the game mechanics. And as we’ll do that, I want you to know a little about where we’re heading in terms of the game design.

One part of the Hattrick game experience in the past, and one can also say it’s been part of the game design, has been that you have to figure out how the game works. We’ve let you know the big picture, but the details have been for you to find out. During the years the user community has discovered the game and found out – piece by piece – how things work and what affects what. And today I would say all, or at least most, things are known.

As these game discoveries (or “mystery”) have been part of the game experience and we don't have that much left of them anymore (as most things are known now), one can say something is missing in the game and the game design now. This "hole" is something we have to fill. But you should know we don’t intend to fill that hole by adding more/new mystery to the game.

Instead we will bring this “old mystery” to the front and make these things/values more visible and absolutely known. We will also make these things more controllable and playable. . With this we turn Hattrick into a game where success will be a matter of what you do with the information you and everyone else have at hands, rather than having to discover the information yourself in the first place.

When it comes to me it’s the decisions, and perhaps especially the decision making, that I find most fun and interesting in a manager game. In Hattrick you do a lot of small and big decisions today, but I want some of them to be more relevant and interesting – and I don’t think we have enough decisions to make as it is. I don’t want to make the game more complex in any way, quite the opposite – I’m confident it will be less complex, but more interesting and fun to play.

But to be a little more concrete and to give you short summary. Wen we now move forward with the game development and the game design, these are the things we’ll focus on:

- More and better control over your team.
Today there are things in the game and different values in your team that you can’t really control in a good way. Such as for example player form, injury risk and more. I want you be able to control and manage these values to a much higher extent than what’s possible today.

- More interesting and relevant decisions to make
As you will be able to manage things you can’t really manage today, you get more decisions to make. These decisions should also be made interesting. With that I mean that decisions may have both benefits and drawbacks (a decision that has only benefits is not really interesting one, it’s an obvious one to make) and that it's clear how a certain decision will affect your team.

- Enable new “hands-on” features
Rather than just letting your decisions affect a certain update that happens in the background, I want them to enable new features/options (where possible) in the game that allows you more direct “hands-on” control. One can for example think of letting you have some form “points” that you can spend on your players.

Now please note that all these changes will not happen over night and all at once, it’s not like you will wake up to a totally new game tomorrow. I just want you to know the general direction for our core game development and how we want the game to evolve going forward now.

New staff system
As mentioned in the beginning, a new staff system is the feature we’ll take on during the autumn. This new staff system will be based on the design I made a while ago now (and which I shared with you in an editorial two years ago), but there will be some changes to the design. It’s really not that strange, after two years you just get a whole lot of new ideas and thoughts about something – and this was no exception. Generally speaking I want it to put even more emphasis on the things I mentioned above. But the big picture will be same:

- You hire one person for a staff role, at a certain level of your choice. The higher level, the better he is.

- You will know what effects he will have on your team, as it’s clearly written out.

- You will only be able to hire one staff member of each kind, and you will have a limited amount of slots.

- All staffers will have positive effects on your team, but they may also have downsides.

Released when?
We aim to have this ready to the global season 54, which starts in late December. But before that, you will get more information about the new staff system, and more detailed information as well.

With this said, I wish you all a nice summer!