This is the beginning of a series where we (I, Eyoel or Anna) will share our progress of PGM 2 with the community. We will also start to showcase artwork for the game, give you a chance to ask questions, give feedback or present your suggestions to us. Tdlr; See summary at end of text. Basically, a beginning for us to come even closer to what you guys want too see happening with the game as we continue the development of PGM 2. This first post will be quite lengthy as we’ve come quite a way on this project since we last shared something with you. But if you are not the kind of person that are into reading long texts, you will find a short summary at the end of the text :) So, where do I start? Well, by being humble and saying a heartfelt thanks to all of you who continues to support and give us energy to work on this project! We know that we f***ed up hard last year, vastly underestimating the amount of work needed to fix the original game. But we learned a lot from that. Since the beginning of the year we have been working hard on the sequel, finding the right people to expand our team with, changing ownership of the company as well as a lot of important behind the scenes organizational stuff. And now we feel we’ve reached the point where it’s time to present to you guys what the game is going to be about. We sifted through all the feedback and issues the community had with the original game to set up our game plan. One of the major issues with PGM was the RNG element in the game. Other major things were a lack of depth, tutorial or explanations on how things worked making it hard to play if you weren’t already familiar with the terminology used in the game. So how is PGM 2 going to be different? Instead of dividing the game into gamer and manager we’ve chosen to focus primarily on the manager aspect of the game putting you, the player, in the driver seat. You get to act as a “god” and as such get to control all the players on your team, either micromanaging their every move or letting them go about their business, taking care of their own needs, praying that things don't go to south. We have split the game into two major parts, one is the house and the other is the arena. To keep this post from running way too long, we will only cover the house part in this update, saving the arena for the next dev blog. Pro Gamers This, to us, is the heart and soul of the game. This includes anything from the purely managerial parts of running the organization such as buying and selling players, playing matches in league and tournaments, keeping an eye on salary caps coming up next season, winning grand prizes and much much more. Apart from this we wanted to use this opportunity to create something much more engaging, something that gives more depth as well as giving the game a more unique touch. That’s why we’ve given every character in the game their own unique setting of personality traits, abilities and skills. Emotions and needs that needs to be fulfilled, both social and more basic like food. As much as the pro gamers are individuals, they also need to function as a team, and that’s where team chemistry comes into play. Build and keep it up and it will help you win more games than if your gamers hate each other. We’ve put massive effort into creating this mechanism, because it’s gives a new depth to the game. You can’t just simply buy the best player and magically win or pick any player on the team to play an important match since they might be having a bad day. Group synergy as well as individual skills make up the best teams. Personality traits and individual skills may develop during a pro gamers life time. There might me talented pro gamers, with an amazing potential that might be emotionally unstable the day you’re hitting a losing streak grating on their nerves until they can’t take it any more. Your star pro gamer might feel unhappy and are their needs not met, they might just quit the team. Another example can be how they feel about breaking a sweat. Pro gaming is not just about putting in the hours in the game, you also need to take care of your physical body. Some pro gamers might love this part of life, others not so much and will therefore try to get out of it if you don’t keep your eyes open. These are just a couple of examples on how we want the pro gamers, as well as other staff (more on these in a later post), to be more dynamic characters, with more skills and needs than just the gaming. E-sport is a part of life, not something isolated from it, and we want to reflect this in the game. We’ve also wanted to change the graphics of the game a bit. We want all gamers to be individuals in appearance as well as personalities. From skin to hair color and body size. Everything is built in modules to adding new stuff along the way will be easy. So there you have it, the creating of characters with depth that is our core. Everything from the newly signed talent, to the maid, to the team captain is something picked by you, the manager, and it’s how you treat them that will decide if it will all end up in success or epic failure There are tons of more stuff we will reveal as time goes on, but this gives you an idea of some of the basics in the game. We will unveil more of the Arena (the part how matches are being played) soon, as well as more specific features in the game, give a deeper understanding of how the economy and the game progression as well as diving into the art style we’ve chosen for the game. But this is start, and we’re aiming to do weekly updates for you guys. All the latest will be found on our (for now slimmed down) website where you can also get a sneak peek of the new logo for the game :) Summary We have built an AI and character driven game, where personalities, skills and traits are different and can change during the course of the game. We want every choice to have a consequence and to give you as Manager as much space as possible to create your own world and gaming experience. Now it's time to get back to internal testing of the game, see you all again next week. Have a great one! /Eyoel