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February 15: New release day #3

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.

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Pre-playing with a working prototype

One of my current projects is to figure out how to adapt football to the Simple Seasons format, which has been trickier than anticipated. Most other sports have a fairly limited range of scores: hockey (typically 0-6), soccer (typically 0-4), even basketball (drop the ones digit and most teams range from 8-12). But football has been tough because of the wide range, plus the different point values assigned to scores.

Now I’ve finally got a working prototype I like, and to test it out, I’ve simulated the upcoming Super Bowl. I started with 10 sims on paper; Kansas City won 6 of them by an average of 9.8 points. And that’s all well and good.

But to really kick things up a notch, I decided to test it on the computer with 5,000 sims. And the results were similar: Kansas City won 50.4% of the matchups in regulation, with 5.1% going to overtime. On average, the score ended up being roughly KC 27, Philadelphia 26, which really isn’t something I’d bet on.

Next up for the future Simple Seasons Football, I need to do some tweaking and work out a full season. But if the score of the game this weekend *does* end up being 27-26, I’ll post the game as-is right then and there.

And stay tuned tomorrow for a different type of football! I’ll be posting Simple Seasons Soccer along with the 2021-2022 EPL and 2022 MLS and NWSL seasons.

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February 2023: New and upcoming releases!

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!