FML ICARUS FC

Q&A with Football Manager Live product manager Marc Duffy


SEGA caught up with Marc Duffy, product manager at Sports Interactive, to quiz him about the much anticipated Football Manager Live.


So Marc, what everyone wants to know is when the playing public will finally get to join the action in FML.
I’m afraid at this stage I’m not really able to say except for the fact that it won’t be out in March. Everyone is working pretty hard now implementing new features and fixing bugs. We’re into the final straight now that’s for sure.
Things must be getting pretty frantic, making sure everything is fine-tuned for launch?
It’s everything you might expect with such a big and innovative project and such a small and focused development team. There are never enough hours in the day to do everything that we really want to do. We decided very early on to adopt a constant development module and we’re being as reactive as we can to feedback from the current batch of beta testers. This means that even though we might not fit everything into the launch version we’ll be able to get code updates out hopefully every 4-6 weeks and pack in lots of new features.
The beta phase of FML started 9 months ago. How have things changed since then?
I think in reality for some of us it started a lot longer. The game that Oliver (Ov Collyer, co-founder of Sports Interactive) arrived back from Australia wanting to make has evolved so much. When we first got the game up and running it was a frantic race to join the game world as quickly as possible and snap up the best talent within the 100k a day wage budget. This led to problems and imbalance, it felt like it was all about the strikers you signed (Henry was a popular choice).
With this in mind, we added in acquisition fees along with wages meaning when you start the game you have 500k to spend on acquisition fees and 100k a day in wages. There is a balance to be struck and no one can afford any of the superstars in the first season at least.
How are your team, ‘The Carpet Burners’ doing? Still flying high with their youth policy? Why on earth are they called that, anyway?
The best thing about the game is that you can be whatever type of manager you want to be. I love the fact that I can assemble a squad full of youngsters at the start and nurture them through the ranks and at some point sell them on for a massive profit. For me, I get a lot of enjoyment out of the game this way. I also love the fact that I have total control of MY club. I can set the name (I don’t really know where The Carpet Burners came from), I can set the kit design and I can even set the pitch size which due to my tactic I tend to ensure is quite narrow to allow my fast tempo pressing game to flourish.
Because of my youth policy, we really struggled in the first couple of seasons and at times it wasn’t much fun. The catalyst for me was when I’d saved enough money up to buy Kaka and he seemed to galvanise my little babies into a team of superstars. It’s little touches like this that make this a special game.
Has your team been affected by periods where you have had either much more or much less time to play?
Generally I suffer from a lack of time… When we started the official beta testing phase last summer I joined the Extreme Football Association thinking that I was a hardcore player and would be able to be there every day and play out all my matches. In reality it’s been nothing of the sort so I’ve had to change federation to suit my playing style (we even added a wizard to help a person like me pick one that’s right for us). In a way, that’s the beauty of the game in that you can play as little or as much of the game as you like. We’ve got people online almost 24/7 and we’ve got people that login 2 or 3 times per week.
With so many human players competing, have there been any controversies that SI have had to resolve? Match fixing scandals or fishy transfers, perhaps?
The beta phase has been a real eye opener in terms of what lengths people will go to in order to win (or do better). We’ve had SI staff working in tandem to take advantages of some code “loopholes”. We’ve had moderators with two accounts in the same game world and transferring players between the teams. In fact, that seems to be the most common trick of all.
We’ve had to remove probably in the region of 30 users either for foul and abusive language or some form of cheating. Every time something is discovered we make sure we sit down and either code the game to remove the problem or discuss other ideas to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
This game will have a long, long lifespan. Can you share with us any exciting additions FML fans can potentially look forward to as the game evolves?
You’ll hear this a lot over the coming months but constant development or reactive development. A lot of what is going to go into future monthly versions of the game will be driven by the community. All that said, we’re looking into a lot of community based features which put the emphasis on working with other human managers and not always necessarily against each other. Things like charging a fee to scout on behalf of another team are the types of thing we really want to work on.
When I’m away from my game because of work or school or something, is there going to be a way I can make sure I don’t lose out on that key player and know the scores?
Yes, this is going to be the icing on the cake for the game. I’m imagining that there will be a large number of people who can’t play when at work due to various policies in their IT department. The brand new FML website will allow you to view important information about not only your team and gameworld but every gameworld in existence. I can’t promise that it will update in real time but it should update fairly frequently for you to never miss a single result or piece of transfer news!
Does that mean I’ll be able to access game data from my phone, or get sms updates?
Eventually yes. We’ve had SMS enabled during beta and it meant I was able to get auction updates when I was in Tesco’s. We’ve looked at and have the code in place to allow you to reply to messages and have the servers process the messages so if I were shopping and I was outbid in an auction or had to negotiate a transfer deal I could very quickly and very simply.
Some of the team are very excited with some of the new phone technology coming out as well so maybe one day we’ll have a cut down version for things like the iPhone.
Well, it looks like we’ll have a fascinating summer getting to grips with FML whilst watching the Euros! Which of the two will capture football fans’ attentions more?
It’s got to be FML. Without any home nation participating it’s going to make for some lonely summer nights. No better way to drown your sorrows than playing FML and chatting with other like minded footie fans.



Earlier published on http://www.fmlmod.blogspot.com/