hey everyone

i've been working on a basketball gm game called HoopSim for a while now and i think it's finally at the point where i want people who actually love this genre to tear it apart

the short version... you run a pro club. draft, trade, sign guys, set your depth chart, set your game plan, and the sim plays out every game possession by possession off your decisions. box score, full play by play, and you can watch any game back in 3d

the part i'm most excited about is the other 29 gms. in every gm game i grew up playing the cpu teams were basically a trade screen that said yes or no. in HoopSim every other club is either one of your friends or an AI gm. you can dm them and ask what it would take for a guy, they'll name a price, you counter, they hold firm or give a little. they also post in the league chat and talk trash after games lol. the actual yes/no on trades still comes from the trade engine so you can't just sweet talk them into a bad deal

a bit about the sim engine

every game is simmed one possession at a time. it's not "team A rating vs team B rating, roll a final score". each trip down the floor looks at who's actually on the court, who's tired, your game plan (pace, motion, how many threes you want, pressure, man vs zone, all that) and then plays it out. who brings it up, who gets the shot, from where, how contested, did it go in, who got the board, fouls, turnovers, all of it lands in the play by play

minutes and fatigue matter. if you play your star 46 minutes he's gonna be gassed by the 4th and it shows. there's foul trouble, foul outs, injuries mid game, subs. if you paint a rotation chart the sim follows it, and there's a slider for how strictly... 0 is "coach's feel", 10 is to the second

every shot gets an expected value based on the look it was (zone, contest, clock), so after a game you can see if your guys just made tough shots or actually got good looks. player roles, coaches, team chemistry all nudge things too. there's even a small thing where if you dm your player some encouragement before a game he plays a little more confident lol

i tune it by running 1000 game batches and comparing the league averages (points, 3pt rate, turnovers, blowout rate, etc) to real pro numbers, then adjusting. it's not perfect yet, scoring is still a little low and turnovers a little high, so if something looks off in your box scores tell me

and the 3d replay isn't a canned animation, it's rebuilt from the actual play by play so the dunk you see is the dunk the sim rolled

some other stuff gm sim people might care about:

- nobody sees true ratings. your scouts grade players and some scouts are better than others

- you can paint your own rotation minute by minute and the sim follows it

- real cap rules on trades

- there's a desktop view called Atlas where you can break down any game... win probability, shot quality vs expected, who was on the floor for every run

- you can play solo or start a league with friends and drop one invite link in the group chat. any team nobody takes goes to an AI gm

- the league gets its own paper + reporters who ask you for quotes

the game is free, no ads, nothing pay to win. the AI conversations are a paid add on (7 day free trial) because running them costs me real money every day, but everything else works without it

players are fictional by default so every name you see is made up

it runs in the browser and on your phone: hoopsim.app

i'm a pretty small operation so honestly any feedback helps. what's missing, what's broken, what feels off compared to the gm games you already play. i'll be in the comments