Three small hot fixes have just been patched:
- fixed the team stats not showing on the team screen due to an always empty drop down
- fixed player rotation lengths not saving
- fixed an error with the draft which caused AI teams not to compare players properly and then frequently draft a player that wasn't as good as the one they should have wanted

Nothing too major - these were all simple changes - but drafts should start to get a little more difficult and a little more predictable!

As always if you do notice something that's not quite right please send an email or post in the bug reports thread on the Discord.

Two small bugs were introduced in the last version - the score worm was not clearing properly between games, and the matchup screen wasn't quite matching players up properly. These two fixes have been hot patched.

The Australian Football Coach 2024 update is finally here!

You'll get an updated 2024 data set, which will expand to 19 teams by default in 2027, and the women's league has been added back to the data set by default, albeit with only fictional players at the moment.

Player ratings
One of the most requested additions, players now receive a rating for every single in-match action they take (or, in some instances, don't take!) This helps you better determine whether your midfielder with a high disposal count is actually having a good game, or which one of your defenders is actually locking down the opposition.

Score worm
The score worm has finally migrated back from the original Australian Football Coach and now complements the score tab on the match screen.

Selection analytics
The new analytics tab on the selection screen helps you figure out your current selection's average attributes in order to help you make better tactical decisions.

Customisable stadiums
If you have stadium graphics, you can now manually define them in the data file to provide additional customisation to your game. This still isn't incredibly user-friendly, but should be accessible to those users who like mods.

Historical team stats
You can now view career stats by team on the Player Statistics tab.

Gameplay updates
Some minor tweaks to the match engine have been made, including making 50-metre penalties dependent on player attributes such as leadership, and including "winger" as a secondary position for midfielders.

There have been several other minor bug fixes and additional tweaks as well to make the game even easier to play! Please post if you find any problems with the new version and there's still more in the works, including a much requested overhaul to the trade system.

Finally the biggest request at the moment is to release the game for Macs - can't comment on this yet, but those requests have definitely been heard!

Hope you enjoy the AFC2024 update.

Australian rules football is back from another long off-season, and with the new season comes a new game update!

Australian Football Coach 2023 will become Australian Football Coach 2023-24 in the next few weeks as the game updates for the new season.

The 2024 database will fully update the men's league for the upcoming season and also re-enables the women's league, though with a more limited database at the moment. Some additional tweaks for modders have already been completed, including more control over player potential for replaying previous seasons, and the ability to add custom images for different stadiums when watching matches. There have also been some user interface tweaks and improvements.

There's a couple more features and additions planned and not implemented yet, so keep an eye out for the update to see what else is new! If you've already purchased the game, all you need to do is sit back and wait for another couple of weeks, and then click "play" once it arrives to embark on another season of footy gameplay.

Hope you enjoy the new additions!

Starting to transition over to planning for any possible future releases, but that doesn't mean the game won't receive any necessary patches!

This patch fixes one quite rare crash but also some other minor issues and tweaks around training and attempting to solve a problem where the game occasionally freezes after a goal.

Full change log is below:
Updated: possible bug when loading custom fixtures file
Updated: coaching impact on training (doubled coaching skills per math so should be twice as impactful)
Fixed: bug with quick play final scores
Improved: quick play simulation code for more realistic results
Improved: code for checking if players are ready to play after a goal, especially when a player is injured
Fixed: Game would crash in a specific parent-child pick situation
Improved: Teams would generally get financially secure after many years, made a slight tweak there

Just some simple fixes today. Nothing much to look up from the clipboard for.

Version 2023.1.22 (released 14 June 2023)
- Fixed: Colour red was being saved in custom team editor, but would appear as white if you switched to another league and switched back (foreground colour)
- Fixed: Colour teal was being saved as foreground when background was selected by user
- Fixed: Rising star and leading goalscorer were switched in player biography generator
- Fixed: Player skills were going through the roof during the offseason
- Fixed?: Grand final stadium was not holding on league editor panel
- Fixed: One of the consecutive goals article feeds was substituting the designated home team in for the away team
- Fixed?: Goal leaders were showing distinct goals scored (so if player A and B led the league with 10 goals and C had 9, would show A:10 C:9)
- Fixed: Injury frequency and trade frequency were updating correctly but not "sticking"
- Improved: Rucks now get a bonus when determining form adjustments
+ Added: Drafts to league selection in league editor

This week's patch focuses on mostly quality of life improvements, but makes big changes to fitness and player development. Players will now develop more quickly during the off-season and fitness will be regained more quickly at the start of the new season, and a player's overall stamina level will dictate at what point fitness starts to get harder to earn.

Injuries have been adjusted too as the default setting was accidentally set to "rarely" instead of "normal." Several bugs have been fixed as well with the remaining bugs around children especially have been cleaned up. Coaches should also get more information around delistings and contract offers in the off-season.

There's still a number of other improvements and fixes planned in the short term which will hopefully be done in the next couple weeks. The game's been out for three months now so development should start slowing down soon and preparing for 2024 and beyond, but if 2023 can be improved, that's still a priority!

Version 2023.1.21 change log:
- Fixed: 3-team finals format contained a data error
- Fixed: Color red was being saved in custom league editor, but would appear as white if you switched to another league and then switched back
- Fixed: Promised draft improvements from 2023.1.20 weren't quite working
- Fixed: Player career information was displaying "and has also 0" instead "has also kicked X goals" due to a coding error
- Fixed: Children have proper height/weights
- Fixed: Children have proper states
- Fixed: Default game injury frequency was being set to rarely and not normal
- Fixed: You could sign free agents outside free agency signing windows
- Fixed: You would not be notified if a player had signed an extension when they were out of contract (not counterintuitive, situation exists in off-season)
- Fixed: A couple typos
- Improved: Custom team nicknames, including additional hard-coded colour schemes (so Blues are always blue)
- Improved: If you change a team's name in the pre-game editor, their stadium name will now also change
- Improved: Fitness is now easier to earn
- Improved: Players should now change skills more quickly during the off-season
- Improved: Slightly better information in a player's career bio
- Improved: You are now notified which players have not been delisted
- Improved: You are now notified when a player likes a better offer
- Improved: You can now see whose child is whose in the player log

The newest AFC2023 patch provides the biggest database update since the game launched, enforces some rules which weren't being enforced, fixes a few bugs, and makes minor improvements to save game sizes.

The database contains some additions and some fixes to incorrect data, which a number of users had asked about.

In terms of improving the game's difficulty, you could go over your player limit during national or rookie drafts - the game should now strictly enforce these player limits and warn you that you may forfeit draft picks in the process! It's perfectly normal not to make every draft pick in real life and now it adds to the challenge of building a flag-winning list.

A couple very rare crashes with some save files have been fixed and a bug where trades were being rejected for draft pick reasons has also been fixed, which was the number one issue since the last patch.

Save games are also a little bit smaller, which shouldn't matter at all in this era of large hard drives, but the game's designed to be as lean and mean as possible for something as intense as simulating the decisions of 44 players every tenth of a second over and over again...

Hope you enjoy the new patch!

Version 2023.1.20 (Released 2 June)
- Fixed: Best Young Player award was not calculating correctly
- Fixed: Crash when the game would pick an active team which wasn't in a league on game load
- Fixed: Game would occasionally crash in very specific midseason/rookie draft situations
- Fixed: Trades could not be initiated
- Fixed: AI Trade Frequency drop-down options box was re-setting to normal
- Fixed: Player limits were not being enforced for human coaches in the national or rookie drafts
- Fixed: Names now sort bi-directionally on Player Selection screen
- Improved: Changed the file format to make save files smaller, new saves will not completely work with older versions (4-5% decrease in file size, will probably void stats if you load a current file with an old version)
- Improved: Database update
- Improved: Added a few cities + Australia-NZ joint custom geography
+ Added: A debug option for scenario loading when it's not working properly (debug_file_loading=1 in Settings.csv)

Today's update is a fairly significant one and with thanks to the reporting users, fixes a number of issues with the game.

First off, AI list managers were still drafting over-age players in the main draft. Considerable time and resources were spent trying to fix this problem, as users had said it's not immersive to see a 27-year-old drafted in the draft. At the same time, if a 27-year-old is clearly by far and away the best pick in the draft, the AI would be justified in drafting them, but this should happen very, very rarely if at all. After a number of fixes in previous patches which addressed this issue specifically, it turned out a single line of code was missing. AI list managers make informed decisions, but the code wasn't forcing them to include young players in their analysis as it should have, even though they were correctly down-weighting older players. This has been fixed.

Also fixed in a slightly less elegant way: teams will always draft three rounds worth of players in the National Draft. This is accomplished by forcibly delisting the worst players on AI teams the day before if they haven't made space. This should be re-written in the next complete edition of the game so the delist won't be necessary. Teams were also over-selecting rookies in the rookie draft, ignoring the rookie maximum, and this is now strictly enforced.

The match engine also sees some significant improvements. Players now dispose the ball slightly less efficiently in order to increase the number of hit-outs and players make more informed decisions about when to kick at goal when no set shot is involved. Players are now a bit more likely to kick at goal overall, but less likely if they're under pressure or far away. While these are minor changes, they continue to make player statistics more realistic.

These changes will be immediate when you update the patch. Hope you enjoy the increased realism!

Full change log:
- Fixed not tested: AI teams were going over their player limit/salary cap
- Fixed: Rookie draft always went six rounds
- Fixed: The AI was still frequently selecting over-age players in the draft in spite of hours and hours and hours spent trying to fix this without forcing a strict age limit, and it turned out a single line of code was missing
- Fixed: Tweaked the disposal code to make sure players were not always disposing to the best option (incorrect disposal rate depends on skill)
- Fixed: Teams were not adhering to the maximum number of rookies on a team rule
- Fixed: Drafted players will revert to developmental roles, even though this gets reset at the start of the next season anyways
- Fixed: Teams will not draft rookies if this puts them over the salary cap
- Fixed: Children will now age properly
- Improved: Teams are less likely to offer players extensions
- Improved: Teams should now spread contract extensions over a longer period of time
- Improved: Teams should offer more two-year extensions
- Improved: Teams will now forcibly de-list players before the national draft in order to ensure they pick for three rounds, even if it leads to strange outcomes (easier to implement)
- Improved: Made players slightly more likely to kick at goal
- Improved: Players less likely to kick at goal when under pressure
- Improved: Expansion teams have over-age player down-weights removed after the sixth round of the draft

Don't get too excited for this one - all this mid-week patch does is fix the bug causing the year to not roll over properly (the patch from last weekend only got halfway there), makes ball-ups slightly more likely on the ground, and changes player's spoiling behaviour in an attempt to make hit out numbers/stoppages more realistic.

That's it. More in the works soon!

Another patch ready for the weekend - what you'll notice most are the new next unread message and read all messages buttons, but this also fixes some things under the hood.

You'll also notice players will run with the ball more when watching the match. Players still greatly respond to pressure, but players were barely running at all, and the logic needed to be updated.

There's also been some minor adjustments to AI list management which will hopefully make for a more interesting offseason.

Version 2023.1.17 (released 11 May)
- Fixed(?): 31 December year rollover bug
- Improved: changed national draft weights further for overage players
- Improved: players should run with the ball more often
- Improved: AI promoted rookies will not be immediately delisted
- Improved: player retirement code
- Improved: Older players less likely to be traded if happy
+ Added: Mark all messages read button
+ Added: Next unread message button

This week's patch adds the "2023 2027 Expansion" scenario, adds the depth chart screen from the draft to your list management panel, and makes a lot of tweaks to the match engine!

First, some friendly modders have made some great content for the game, including some historical scenarios, available in the game's Discord. To better support these scenarios, recent patches have allowed the game to automatically update teams and rules from year to year, and this means mods can expand or merge teams automatically as time passes. This new feature has been used in the new scenario to add a new team to the game for long plays without anyone needing to do anything manual. This has not been made the default scenario, though, per user feedback.

The match engine has also received some fairly significant tweaks. A bug meant substitutes were never being subbed on after a certain point, and no code existed for tactical substitutes until this version, so you should now see the AI make tactical subs. Substitution rules for each league were one of the league editor variables that have been added as well and future support for number of substitutes in a league is planned.

The match engine has also been re-weighted fairly significantly. New rules on when and where players will pass the ball backwards have been implemented. The kick-to-handball ratio was slightly in favour of kicks and has been slightly re-weighted to be more handball-friendly. The other major change impacted the players being nominated for the awards at the end of the game - goals were significantly down-weighted and a new predictive formula which up-weights effective disposals has been implemented.

The depth chart panel on the draft screen was always meant to be duplicated and a friendly nudge from a user means it's not available on your list management screen. A small number of additional league editing variables were added to the league editor screen as well and some really dumb errors with save games were fixed.

Finally there were some minor adjustments to how form and fitness is calculated, and AI coaches will delist fewer players at the end of the season.

Hope you enjoy the new version!

Version 2023.1.16 (released 6 May)
- Fixed: players with non-forward primary positions and forward secondary positions were not getting some forward bonuses
- Fixed: code which flags whether the substitute has been used now exists at the moment of interchange, not when the interchange is decided, to ensure cancelled interchanges don't make you lose the sub
- Fixed: bug which was preventing substitutes from entering the game has been removed
- Fixed: Substitution rules now work properly across leagues
- Fixed: Variables relating to 666 rule and which days games should be scheduled for were not saving properly
- Fixed: Re-wrote form message to be more performance orientated
- Fixed: Excess player de-listing was ignoring rookies
- Fixed: Tweaked handball/kick ratio (increased handballs)
- Improved: Adjusted Most Valuable Player game score calculations based on real life modelling
- Improved: Players will now make backwards disposals with more intelligence
- Improved: Tweaked fitness increase rate very slightly
- Improved: Code for kicking goals now more closely correlates with player attributes
- Improved: Code for winning a loose ball contest now more heavily favours better players
+ Added: Depth chart screen on list management panel
+ Added: Additional league editing features (maximum number of players on a team not including rookies, grand final stadium, substitution rule)
+ Added: Modders can now disable form from being used in their simulations by including ignoreform=1 in the Settings.csv scenario file
+ Added: 2023 2027 Expansion scenario

Another quick patch for the weekend players fixing several small but not unimportant issues. The biggest new feature is a positional drop-down menu on the draft screen. A near-future patch should have an additional scenario for long players where a Tasmanian team gets added to the league in a few years and this cleans up several small issues in preparation for that update.

Version 2023.1.15 (in progress)
- Fixed: youth skills in Settings.csv were still being overwritten on player creation
- Fixed: game no longer automatically simulates to preseason (bug introduced in 2023.1.14)
- Fixed: game was trying to delete unmatched statistical rows on the season stats load, but instead it was deleting valid rows instead from the start of the file
- Fixed: bug with events file league triggers
- Fixed: game was sometimes simming past its intended date after a new year, now force-stops on 1 January
- Fixed: background leagues were not storing total goals and behinds properly
- Fixed: bye rounds for leagues with an odd number of teams should at least start to work properly again, but need to keep testing
- Improved: Added positional sort to draft

Today's patch is very small but has two big impacts: more behinds, and more options on custom league start!

There was an issue with the behinds code which was causing fewer behinds than you'd expect. This has now been fixed. Also, the custom league code changed between versions, meaning that you couldn't create a custom league with a fantasy draft or choose not to be fired. This was another oversight, and you can now start your custom league with custom settings!

There is also a hot-fix for a couple small oversights in the last patch with regards to modding. Everything worked fine, but the game ran code later on down the line which reset any user inputs with regards to custom player generation parameters in Settings.csv. Also, you couldn't script teams to switch stadiums in a scenario, another oversight - this has now been added.

Finally, attendance was added to the match center screen.

Hope you enjoy these simple but important fixes!

Change log:
- Fixed: New Settings.csv player generation parameters were being overwritten before player generation
- Fixed: Created new code for whether a kick is a behind to increase the number of behinds, this could have some odd knock on results
- Improved: Added fantasy draft/preseason skipping/other options to custom leagues
- Improved: Match center now shows attendance
+ Added: Can now script stadium moves

The newest patch for Australian Football Coach 2023 has just been released and while it's really one for the modders, the game adds functionality in the direction of the overall franchise road map. One of AFC2023's core features is its customisability. For those users wanting more than a custom league, all of the database files are simple tab-separated text files and almost all of the image files are editable, and several users have already created some amazing mods as a result.

While this was expected to be a 2024 feature, this patch will let users create scenarios and then define future events, such as league expansion, adding or removing drafts, or even merging teams, as the league plays out. There's even a new dynamic merge feature which will merge the two worst-performing teams!

There's also updates for player skill generation. Users can now define the maximum upper and lower skill limits for generated players each league in a mod.

While the vast majority of coaches won't notice much (unless a crash was introduced and missed, which is always sadly possible), this is a big patch for moving the game along its development track. Look for future improvements such as adding back in more historical rules, including some from the original Australian Football Coach such as the veteran's rule, to provide more realism to historical simulations.

Apologies to those waiting on a more robust online multiplayer module - it's still coming, it's just a slog to make work correctly. Hopefully the basics will be available in the next update, including setting user passwords!

Full change log:
- Fixed: Game would sometimes crash when writing career end news stories
- Improved: Scouting reports on players on human controlled teams will always be generated when that player is recruited (via signing a contract) for the first time
- Improved: changed player peak age weights
- Improved: Added parameters for player skill generation in the scenario Settings.csv file
- Improved: Re-created veterans rule variable, though it doesn't do anything noticeable yet
+ Added: Zoned players can now be added just like draft picks
+ Added: Game now recognises Events.csv in a scenario file, allowing you to program automated league changes over time

AFC2023 has been available just under a month and thanks to your support, a number of improvements have been made across all aspects of the game.

This week's patch focuses almost exclusively on long plays. Player development has always been a strange issue in the Australian Football Coach series, as the AI is programmed to make the best possible decision it can (given parameters), so previous versions had strange bugs where the AI was drafting over-age players with the top pick in the draft. This has been mostly fixed, but there was an additional problem: players weren't retiring normally. Some would stick around for years, which is clearly not how the way player attribute modelling was supposed to work over time. However, player potential's also been designed to be a fairly complex game element, where you are able to develop young players, but not every player will necessarily reach their potential.

This version should fix that. Several tweaks were made, several long plays were conducted, and player potential was modelled and compared to expected, and it's working well now! If anything, players are now retiring too early, but that's better than having 40-year-old duffers clogging up your lists.

Most players will still progress either up to a certain age or a certain skill level, but you should see more rapid improvements in your promising youth and more rapid declines in your aging players across all save files.

The lack of updates over the past week or so was due to a lack of reported hard crashes (the primary concern with patches) and due to testing ways to improve simulation speed. This was done on a different code set and the results meant that it's more of a future project. As a result no substantial improvements have been made. This includes the online mode, which is still a work in progress. Some minor improvements to game speed have been made, but unfortunately you probably won't notice them unless you've played a long time, as the game's started to clean up some data bloat that was dragging game speeds down.

Hope you long players enjoy the new version!

CHANGE LOG
- Fixed: Leagues without any sort of feeder source (draft, zoning) now have additional automated youth intake
- Fixed: Completely reworked player development - players should now progress and regress as intended, most player development was pretty flat and players weren't cycling into retirement
- Fixed: Fitness was being treated similarly to other actual attributes and has been reworked to increase more quickly
- Fixed: Game would sometimes crash calculating attendance - not sure how widespread this was
- Fixed: Game was not loading club best and fairest winners from save files
- Fixed: Could not figure out where children were being duplicated, but wrote code to de-dupe them on save game load
- Fixed: Shortlisted players not being on a team would occasionally crash the game
- Improved: Game now unloads out of date scouting reports on saving or annual turnover
- Improved: Game now unloads out of date shortlists on annual turnover
- Improved: Slight, again likely imperceptible improvements in game speed. Haven't noticed anything in testing but may cause issues with screens not refreshing
- Improved: AI Training logic

Another day, another small patch! This one simply fixes a number of odds and ends which may have reduced your enjoyment of the game.

Version 2023.1.11 change log:
- Fixed: game would crash if you tried to create an expansion team with 3 colour hoops as a jumper
- Fixed: Suspended players weren't being removed from their team's selection
- Fixed: Debuts sometimes weren't displaying
- Fixed: Wrong columns were being centred
- Fixed: Auto-selecting a team no longer messes up which player you click on during selection
- Fixed: Players who were slightly homesick would display homesickness as a minor issue even if they were in their home state
- Fixed: Bug which caused you to accept the wrong AI trade due to a sorting error
- Fixed: A single letter typo was causing any under-21 year old to be rising star eligible
- Fixed: Scheduling bug with the odd game bye option was causing havoc
- Updated: Minor player database fixes
- Updated: Tasmanian teams should play an even number of games now
- Improved: Game scoring algorithm now uses effective disposals, not disposals, for its game calculations
+ Added: Teams must now confirm their selection by default

As the daily bug patching slowly comes to an end, today features a slightly bigger update than usual!

To start, there's a new feature for those of you who don't want to be tempted by editing, and some quality of life improvements for the free agency period!

A feature that's been requested for awhile was turning off player editing. This is now an option on game start - "hard mode." You cannot turn editing on once you've turned it off! This will likely be extended to team editing as well in the near future - don't worry, player name editing and number editing hasn't been completely removed.

Some quality of life things have been done around the off-season, including more notifications about free agency and draft days which weren't triggering, and a fancy new chart on the list management which shows you which players you've offered contracts to. There's also a fix for bidding on players who have been offered contracts by other teams - you'll be told they have an offer on the table, and they'll make a new offer that's higher than whatever their initial offer was. There's also more information about what period of the free agency window you're in, and an option to stop the game when the trade period opens. There's still an issue with some free agency notifications but those'll be sorted shortly.

Work's also been done on the online multi-player module, but it's not quite ready yet.

To start, this patch fixes several crashes and bad bugs. First the crashes:
- The game should no longer start off screen or partially off screen. Thought this had been fixed before, but it wasn't, so hopefully that's the case here, but it worked perfectly on all of the testing computers. Most users weren't impacted by this, but it was a really bad bug for the ones that were.
- The game was crashing when shortlists were being saved and then re-loaded, this was newly introduced from a couple patches ago. Your save games should return without any problem, but you may have to re-create your shortlist.
- The game wasn't randomising coaching attributes properly, so when some specific coaches were loaded from the database and got hired, they would crash the game.

And the bugs:
- Team statistics weren't saving at all.
- Sometimes interchanges wouldn't clear properly if they were cancelled. If this happened right at the start of the game, the player on the bench would be flagged to interchange but the on-field player wouldn't, meaning the player would never interchange in and play 0:00 for the game.
- The AI team selector was having difficulty with selecting multiple rucks and then substitutes not getting playing time.
- If you accepted a trade for draft picks, the other trades with those draft picks wouldn't go away.
- Expansion teams couldn't trade draft picks
- Fouling wasn't utilising the entire 1-100 attribute scale, you probably won't notice since it's not a huge change, but this has been fixed.
- The AI list manager code was occasionally delisting players who won awards. This has been named the Doug Rattray rule, after a completely ordinary fictional player in someone's fantasy draft game averaged 40 disposals a game in whatever league he played in, won the Best Player in the League award after getting drafted mid-season, and was then unceremoniously delisted. (It's unclear why he was so dominant. That's something to look into.) AI list managers will now keep players around if they're award winners.

There were a couple small tweaks to the database, and youth players had their skills reduced as they were coming into the league too powerfully.

But wait, there's more! League editors will find a couple fixes - the stadium screen shouldn't jump to the top anymore, commissioner mode should let you draft for every team again, and 24-team leagues now let you edit every team at the start of the game.

Glad you're still enjoying the game and please pop in the game hub or the discord if you have any issues or suggestions!

Version 2023.1.9 has been released!

This patch was pushed today because it fixes an issue with screen resolutions - sometimes the screen would spawn on the first game load way off the upper left part of the screen to the point of being unplayable. This patch SHOULD fix the issue - it's not replicated on any tester's machines, so cannot completely confirm, but the fix did work the way it was supposed to on at least one computer. If the game's still launching far to the upper left, please get in touch.

Unfortunately this means a player progression issue hasn't been completely tested - a bug in the code was preventing older players from declining at the expense of younger players, so younger players should start improving more. This could potentially mean player progression has become unbalanced again, but the upper left bug was too important of a fix to wait on, and the "Benjamin Button" bug was too important not to fix, so look for more player progression balancing in the next couple patches.

Full change log:
- Fixed: Shortlists weren't saving
- Fixed: Windowed resolutions should now default to the upper left part of a computer screen
- Fixed: League and team news wasn't deleting after a period of time
- Fixed: Benjamin Button code meant players didn't decline with age
- Fixed: Set hard age retirement cutoff at 45
- Fixed: Coaches were not retiring properly

Another mostly bug fix patch, especially around the match simulation. The one feature you'll definitely notice is a new 32x simulation mode, which from the number alone will tell you is twice as fast as the 16x patch!

Most of these are still bug fixes - hopefully some new features will be introduced in the near future, especially online commissioner options, which is the biggest feature left that didn't make it in by release day. More match simulation tweaks are also planned as well, starting with better AI coaching in terms of defence.

Version 2023.1.8:
- Fixed: teams were draining scouts from the scouting pool
- Fixed: Ball trails were only appearing in even quarters
- Fixed: Kick in takers selected mid-match should now properly take
- Fixed: Minor bug with number colouring
- Fixed: Small team crests weren't appearing in the history screen after a loaded game
- Improved: Logic regarding kicking into space
- Improved: Can now turn ball trails on/off
- Improved: Very slight update to teams and players database revolving player potential and kit clashes
+ Added: 32x speed sim mode

Lots of updates today for Australian Football Coach, fixing a lot of bugs that were identified post-release, but also adding a couple things! A tutorial mode will walk new players through each coaching panel screen if you haven't played before.

The patch was rushed due to another crash which occurred when you quit your job, but also fixes a number of other minor bugs including several display bugs, a bug with loading team statistical data, percentages always rounding to zero, improvements to some news items, and trades!

Due to a change in the way the game's GUI worked, some code which was migrated over didn't click and drag players properly, but upon closer inspection, the trading module didn't make a lot of sense. While it's completely impossible to re-work it in a day, some basic fixes should have improved your experience when making trades. There's also now code to prevent the AI from spamming you with trade offers.

Since this was a crash fix, the trade code wasn't tested as thoroughly as it could have been, so work will continue this week. Please patch any problems as you find them!

Thanks again for playing and enjoying the game so far.

Another day another patch! This one has been pushed immediately since it fixes a bug introduced shortly before launch caused by attendances in state and youth leagues defaulting to zero which was preventing some players from getting past the off-season.

An attendance bug was also fixed for secondary stadiums and the attendance reworked slightly so people should now start showing up to state league games, even just a little. Attendance was based on statistical data from a national league, so state league attendance may still need more work... Other slight additions like a tweak to trading or adding city as an editable stadium field have been sorted.

Hope you enjoy the update!

Another early patch brings AFC2023 up to version 2023.1.4, which fixes a crash when selecting jumpers or when starting custom games with specific settings, and fixes a couple other bugs. You should also now be able to use the medical substitute for players on the bench and the long term injury list should correctly identify players, allowing you to drag them over. Some minor database updates were made as well.

Once another reported but so far undiscovered crash is located, 2023.1.5 will be pushed, hopefully in the next day or two. There have been some good suggestions as well but these will take longer to implement.

Thanks for playing, and hope you're enjoying the game!

It was always going to happen - the first day after release was set aside for troubleshooting as AFC2023 made its way to far more than just beta testers. Thank you to everyone who submitted feedback, and even if you didn't, thanks for picking the game up on launch day! It's been encouraging hearing how people are enjoying the game so far. The average play length is already almost two hours, which has to be a good sign?

That being said, there were some issues which needed patching, and the game is now on version 2023.1.2.

The biggest issue was that the game would not go past 31 December, which was a bug caused by one line of code. If you've hit this wall, it's now fixed and won't have any further impact on your game. A couple other crashes were fixed as well, including the game crashing when some players asked for a contract of zero years, and another new line of code crashing the game whenever you were unemployed has also been sorted. 2023.1.1 also fixed an issue with the new U-19 leagues not simulating.

Some gameplay elements were also changed. The key player weights the AI uses were modified again, and the AI will also now value younger players more heavily in the national draft. Previously code just down-weighted players by age, now it actively up-weights younger players.

Several questions related to player potential were received, and potential probably needs to be explained better by the game's scouts. AFC2023 does not include an actual potential attribute that can be edited, instead using a more complicated system using several different variables. Scouts then interact with these variables, so one scout may tell you something completely different about a player's potential than another scout, and even good scouts can be wrong sometimes! Since there were a couple queries around player potential it's something which will be looked at, perhaps too many youngsters aren't making the grade.

Coaches were the big gameplay tweak and the available staff are now sortable and more diverse in their salary requests. If there's something that's not sortable that should be, please post here or on Discord - each sort has to be manually programmed and it looks like some columns may have gotten overlooked. Selection table sorting was not complete, either.

Finally work continues on the game's database - the last big update was a couple months ago, and some things have changed since then. Some players have had their skills changed, some players have been added, retired, or un-retired, and one team in particular was down-weighted. There was also a typo in team IDs causing a "trade" between two different teams. Work on this will continue into the next patch.

A bug with post-game news articles saying was also fixed, and small improvements made there.

What hasn't been fixed?
- There appear to be a couple problems with interchanges, which are complex and couldn't be fixed/added in a day
- There's been reports full screen mode isn't working - if this is happening to you please send a screenshot if you could, this sort of got replicated in testing but then sorted itself on the next launch.
- There's been a report inactive leagues have come to life after a load, which couldn't be replicated.
- Sometimes the game resolution doesn't adjust for things properly. There's a workaround which involves editing the game's settings.
- Apparently you can launch the game on Steam Deck but not really play it. The fact it worked on Steam Deck at all was news here at "AFC2023 studios" but if this can be sorted it'll get sorted...

The next update will probably be more minor bug patches but hopefully a feature or two can sneak in as well!

Thanks again for a great launch day, and keep posting your suggestions and feedback! Hope you continue to enjoy AFC2023.

Australian Football Coach 2023 has been released! New features, tweaked statistics, and a whole new GUI make it easier than ever before to coach an Aussie rules team to the premiership flag.

Also note unlike many games these days, this isn't an "early access" release - it's the full game! Still, as with any good simulation, there's always things to add and improve, and there's now a post-release road map for AFC2023.

In the coming weeks the following additions have been planned:
- Online multiplayer mode, which will allow a league commissioner to send out save games to managers in a turn-based format. This is mostly complete, but was not able to go at launch;
- Off-season improvements, especially with regards to notifications;
- Database updates, including the potential to migrate seasons over from older versions of Australian Football Coach if requested as the data format is mostly compatible;
- Continuing to build out the new morale module. It's complete, but the number of events which impact player morale can now be expanded upon much more cleanly;
- Other minor odds and ends, especially additional news items;
- Exploring the addition of a Mac version, but without any specific promises. Mac is currently difficult to support.

The first priority include fixing any bugs which have slipped past the testers as well, so any hot fixes could be released as early as this weekend. If the game crashes, please get in touch here or on the discord with a report of what happened just before the crash and it'll get sorted as quickly as possible.

Hope you really enjoy AFC2023 and thank you for playing!