It’s a football (soccer) management game. Not an open source one, so you’re not going to find the code for it here. But the development process has been very open, so I’m hoping people will learn from it.
Because modern games are far too in-depth and complicated for an old man like me. I have too many children and too many things to do. I tried playing a recent version and could appreciate the quality, but didn’t enjoy the game. Too many things felt like guesswork (team talks, training, youth advancement etc) and I don’t have the time or the interest to create spreadsheets to try to understand this kind of stuff.
It’s fast, it’s fun, and it’s easy to jump in and out of. While it still has a full 2d match engine, multiple countries and leagues, and tens of thousands of players to buy and sell, it’s all hosted on my servers. You can play through a browser or dedicated apps, which means you can jump in from your computer, phone or tablet wherever you are, and continue the exact same game. Your progress follows you around.
Matches can be watched over a full 90 minutes in real time, or you can jump straight to the result, or choose to watch some highlights. You can finish a match in seconds or hours. How you play is down to you.
Transfers are simplified to remove agents, work permits, and other realistic but tedious things. If you have budget, and a player wants to sign for you, you can sign them.
When it’s ready isn’t a helpful answer, but it’s the truthful one. I’m aiming for the start of the 2024/2025 season. If you want to play earlier i’m often looking for new testers, so head over to the website and find the get involved section.
Here are a couple from a recent-ish update. Bear in mind that, with the exception of sorting out the basic UI (as seen on the squad page), these are very much work-in-progress or early development shots.
Central to so much of the experience, the squad view gives you lots of information in an easy to understand way. I’ll talk more about the “desire” rating later, it’s part of big drive to better replicate the connections and personalities that are easy to judge face-to-face, but so often hard to judge in games.
Attention has been on the match engine itself so far, rather than visual polish. You can’t even tell which team or player is which in this screenshot, a far from ideal situation in any football game. Once the gameplay is done and the matches play out like real football, focus will switch to these details.
Legacy Manager is made in London by Will Grey/Funny Old Games. Follow along on:
- The WillGreyLDN X/Twitter
- On GitHub for work stuff
- The Legacy Manager website