Basketball GM is a single-player basketball management simulation game. Set your roster, make trades, draft prospects, manage your finances, and try to build a dynasty. Play it in your browser now, completely 100% free!
Improvements to the injury system
October 27, 2019 - Injuries, New Feature, UI
Today I released new versions of Basketball GM and Football GM that contain some improvements to injuries.
In the past, each player (except quarterbacks in FBGM) had an equal probability of getting injured. That’s now been changed to give older players an increased injury risk and younger players a decreased injury risk. This both makes sense and is supported by data showing a 3% increase in injury risk per year as a player ages.
New dashboard UI
October 22, 2019 - UI
The “dashboard” is the screen you see here listing all your leagues. I just gave it a facelift. The old one looked like this:
The new one looks like this:
I think the differences are pretty evident from just looking at the screenshots or trying out the new dashboard. But I just want to mention a few of the improvements…
Owner messages revamp
September 3, 2019 - New Feature, Technical, UI
The annual message from the owner has long been a quirky feature of Basketball GM. Each season, you’d get some strange message from the owner about your progress. By reading it, you could figure out how close you were to getting fired.
There were problems though. The messages got repetitive if you played a lot. Sometimes the messages were confusing and possibly buggy, like if you win the title and the owner is still not happy with how much you’re winning.
Also the messages were often racist, sexist, or otherwise offensive. In my defense, those were all paraphrases of things our wonderful real life pro sports owners have said. But I don’t think everyone got the joke.
Overall, it was not a great system. Finally, I have replaced it. Instead of the long old messages, you get a short message containing your overall performance, your performance in the past year, and a quick recommendation for next year. Also, you get a chart of your past performance, which looks like this:
A few small improvements
August 17, 2019 - AI, New Feature, UI
No huge news here, sorry, but there are a few minor improvements in version 2019.08.18.0097:
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A lot more tables (such as Draft Summary) are searchable, filterable, and downloadable. There’s still a few that aren’t. Let me know if that’s a problem. Also let me know if I messed anything up with this change, since the table component is used in many many places!
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In the past, when you got fired, the AI would never actually change your finance settings back to something reasonable. So if you made them unreasonable, the results would look silly. Now the AI resets their finance settings every year.
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The Hall of Fame cutoff adjusts based on the number of games in a season and the length of a quarter. Previously, short leagues would have empty HoFs and long leagues would have tons of HoFers.
Specifically, the cutoff is multiplied by
sqrt(quarterLength / 12) * numGames / 82. The square root is to account for fatigue in games - shorter games mean the starters play a higher fraction of the game (and the cutoff should be a bit higher) and longer games mean the opposite.
As always, let me know if you notice any problem with this stuff, or if you have any other feedback!
"Untouchable" players and picks in trades
October 15, 2018 - New Feature, UI
When you’re trying to make a trade, you can click the “What would make this deal work?” button to get a counter offer from the AI team you’re trading with. Often this results in the AI asking for something you really don’t want to give up, like your best player or a high draft pick. Then what you really want to say to the AI is, “okay, you can’t have that, but is there any other assets I have that could make this deal work?” But there was no way to ask that. Until now!
Lots of small UI improvements
October 7, 2018 - New Feature, UI
Today I released an update to Basketball GM containing a lot of small improvements to the UI. Most of them are small tweaks that, when seen in aggregate, will hopefully just make the game feel a bit cleaner and smoother.
But there’s also some sexy.
Logos for default teams
June 4, 2016 - New Feature, UI
The default teams now have logos! Thank you Elliott Strauss for all your hard work!
Currently you'll only see the logos on the roster page, which doesn't really do them justice. Eventually I will do a redesign to better utilize them. In the mean time, check them out here in their full glory: