Welcome back to another new release Wednesday! Today’s theme is “inaugural years.” Some of these I had to stretch a little, but each one of today’s six Simple Seasons is a year one.
Dropping today, we have:
Enjoy!
I’ve got a free Simple Season to put out there today, and it’s a new kind of season to add to the collection: interrupted seasons. This tag will be appended to those seasons that didn’t quite go as scheduled; some examples are:
So what makes this different than a standard year? If a bundle has an as-played schedule, the original full schedule will also be included if possible. For some seasons, though, it’s hard to find the actual schedule, so I’ve done my best to create a fictional schedule that adheres to the standards of the time. Sometimes, as in the case of today’s addition (for free! might I add), there’s a planned schedule and an adjusted schedule, and neither of those go the way they were supposed to. The 2020-2021 NWHL (now the PHF) season has all three.
These seasons will great for people interested in the “what if?” aspect of sports replays. What if baseball hadn’t stopped in 1994? What if the Washington Capitols or Baltimore Bullets hadn’t dropped out of the NBA? Now you can find out!
For the third Wednesday in a row, there’s another release day for you. This time I’m throwing back to the distant past of 2020-2021: NHL, NBA, WNBA, and MLS (which is just 2021, mind you). Now you can replay the last two seasons of these leagues with Simple Seasons!
Also out today are the first historical modifier sheets, which you can use to pit teams from different seasons against each other. You can find the basketball mod sheets (for men’s, women’s, and mixed games) in both the Free section and the Simple Seasons Basketball section. (Hockey historical mod sheets are TBA.)
Upcoming releases
I’ve got a special free season coming up either later today or tomorrow. Keep an eye out for it!
And coming up next week: historical seasons! Plus the first “rival” league, which I’ll explain in a future post.
Works in progress
Work on my full-play baseball game continues, despite being hampered slightly by a severe overhaul of card design and a moderate overhaul of game mechanics. Since pitchers and catchers are reporting this week, it’s good to have this on the table, even if it requires a few more tweaks! I’m still aiming for a late-March release.
I’m also excited that my first fictional league for Simple Seasons will be ready for release soon. No date in mind yet, but it should be good to go by mid-spring. And if everything goes well, it’ll be part of something bigger–but we’ll see.
Our first release day!
Short Season Games is celebrating our grand opening with not one but two editions of the Simple Seasons game: Simple Seasons Basketball and Simple Seasons Hockey! I’ve tested and tweaked each of these to make sure they’re good to go, and I’m happy to say they’re ready for their debut.
But you can’t play these games without teams, right? So additionally, I’ll be releasing two of the most recent seasons in each sport: 2021-2022 NHL, 2021-2022 PHF, 2021-2022 NBA, and 2022 WNBA. Create your own history by replaying these exciting seasons!
Simple Seasons is an easy and fun way to simulate anything from a single matchup to an entire season of games. In most cases, all you need is to make two dice rolls, and you’ve got yourself a realistic and believable result between any two teams. This can be a standalone game (which, I can personally attest to, is pretty fun), or you can use it as a supplement for another game (for instance, if you’re playing a season of full games with one team but want to quickly decide the results of all other NPC teams). I’ve tested each sport dozens of times to ensure that results are close to the real thing–but just different enough to make things real interesting!
Upcoming releases
To celebrate the opening of this new store, I’m going to post more games and seasons on a weekly basis. I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep up that pace for the entirety of this project, but might as well come out strong! Currently, the release schedule looks like this:
February 8 – The Simple Seasons Soccer core bundle should be all set to go by next week. Debuting along with it will be the 2022 MLS, 2022 NWSL, and 2021-2022 EPL seasons.
February 15 – This week will see the release of two-year-old seasons in three American sports: 2020-2021 NHL, 2020-2021 NBA, 2021 MLS, and 2021 WNBA.
February 22 – Time to get historical. The last release of February will feature some important seasons in the histories of these sports: 1942-1943 NHL (the first year the league was only the Original Six), 1949-1950 NBA (the first year under that name), 1996 MLS (the first year of our current US soccer pyramid), and 1997 WNBA (the first year for the major American women’s basketball league). And not only that, but I’ll post the first season of the ABA (1967-1968) as well.
March 1 – With what I hope will be Short Season’s first successful month in the books, I’m planning on releasing another sport in the Simple Seasons line, plus two seasons for it–but I’ll keep that sport a secret for now. In addition to those, I’ll also have some foreign (read: non-US) soccer leagues to post, too. As with anything a few weeks out, these are less certain, but I can guarantee at least one!
Of course, this is all subject to change, and it already has once or twice. It just depends what time I have, what information is available, and what sport is interesting me most during any given week.
Works in progress
I’m working on a lot in my spare time and having a blast with it. In the future, I’d like to get a Simple Seasons Baseball game out by the Spring and a Simple Seasons Football game by the summer.
And don’t worry, I plan on offering more than just quick-play games! My baseball long-play game, the one which started this whole idea years ago, should be ready for release around Opening Day (hopefully it’ll be timed perfectly!). Eventually, my basketball game will be ready as well, but I’ve only recently started working on that, so it may be a while. Not to mention, I’d love to branch out of solely sports games someday, but I’ll start with what I know.
So much to look forward to!
