TEW2016: Developer's Journal

Adam schrieb:Feb 01: Alliance Titles

By popular request, TEW2016 features the debut of alliance titles.

Alliance titles, as the name suggests, are title belts that do not belong to a specific company. Instead, they are linked directly to an alliance.

When booking a show, any member company has the ability to request to borrow a title from the alliance. As long as no other company is already using it, the request will be granted and the belt in question becomes the property of that company for the rest of the evening. It can then be used in exactly the same way as any other title that the company owns.

When borrowing a title, the champion(s) will automatically be added to the company's roster too, as long as they're available to do so. This essentially works as a special 'one night only' loan.

AI-controlled companies will also regularly use alliance titles, meaning that the champion(s) will end up defending their titles regularly for lots of different companies.

There are both pros and cons to having your own employees win alliance titles. On the plus side, those workers will improve faster and gain more popularity because they will be working more dates than usual for a variety of companies in a variety of locations. The downsides are that the increased schedule means they have the potential to get fatigued, their injury risk is obviously increased, and the increased exposure can mean that they'll naturally become targets for bigger companies.

Alliance titles, and their histories, can be viewed at any point via the alliance screen. The alliance also has the ability to vacate titles if the champion(s) end up being unable to defend the titles (for example, if they were to sign a written deal with a company who is not in the alliance).

Adam schrieb:Feb 02: Contract Offer Templates

This probably isn't the most glamorous new feature in the world, but a lot of people asked for it so I thought I'd get it out of the way early!

In the negotiation system the user now has the ability to save and use templates; these are specific combinations of offers and incentives that can be given an appropriate name. For example, you may put together a template called 'TV Try Out' which specifies a PPA two date / one month contract with an 'exclusively in-ring' usage attached. Any time you come to negotiate you can then click TV Try Out from the template list and that will all be automatically filled in for you. There's no limit to how many templates you can construct.

For those users who have specific 'go to' offers, this will obviously save quite a lot of clicking over time.

Adam schrieb:Feb 03: Home Bases & Travel Costs & Moving House

All workers now have a home base, which is the region in which they currently live. This can either be set as a specific region via the editor or simply given as an area in which case the AI will pick an appropriate region for the when a new game begins.

A worker's current location has several uses (some of which will be discussed in later journal entries). One such use is that it allows travel costs to be calculated, meaning that small companies now have more incentive to hire workers local to them to cut costs.

A worker's home base can change over time. This can both be temporary (for example, if a foreign worker joins a touring company he may choose to stay in that country for the duration of the tour) or long-term. If a worker chooses to move house the game will also recognise this as being a big move and his or her romantic partner may go too.

Feb 03: New Picture Formats & Automatic Custom Backgrounds

As well as JPG format, the game now also gives the option to support BMP and GIF pictures. Please note that PNG is not supported - as with WMMA, this is not through choice but because the programming language does not support it.

One advantage of this is that the game now offers automatic custom backgrounds for transparent GIFs. For example, if you view a worker who has a transparent GIF picture in a company specific screen (i.e. a roster screen) then the background behind him will automatically be that company's logo - this essentially creates a custom background wherever that worker goes.

Adam schrieb:Feb 04: AI Created Alliances

New to the game this year is the ability for AI companies to band together to form a new alliance; previously alliances could only be formed if a player chose to create one. New alliances are determined by company size, the personalities of the owners, their location, and whether it is mutually beneficial.

Feb 04: Wrestler's Court

To reflect reality, locker rooms can now have their own 'wrestler's court'. Essentially a self-policing method, a locker room leader acts as judge and can sentence workers who commit minor offences to punishments. This helps improve the personalities of some workers. The user has no say in the wrestler's court, it is something handled independently by 'the boys', but just adds more realism.

A massive amount of time has been spent making the backstage environment more alive and making the user's handling of the locker room a key element in the gameplay; Wrestler's Court is the first of many features that will be revealed over the coming months that play into this emphasis.

Adam schrieb:Feb 05: Organic Biographies

TEW2016 will be the first game in the series to feature the option of organic biographies for workers.

Every worker either has the option of having organic biographies enabled or staying with the traditional pre-written version. If organic biography is enabled, that worker will have his bio automatically created by the AI when the game begins and it will be updated whenever something noteworthy happens to him.

The setting can be changed on a worker-by-worker basis whenever the user wants. It can also be set via the Options menu so that newly generated workers will be set appropriately.

The organic bios are created by tapping into a series of pre-written templates and stitching together the sentences into a paragraph based on what has happened to the worker. Topics that can be referenced include the worker's basic details, employment (both past and present), tag teams, titles held, positions of power held, important relationships, honours, and outside interests (such as if they regularly film movies). Organic bios work for all workers, whether they're an active wrestler or not.

Obviously the organic bios are far more rigid than those that are pre-written and would tend to be very similar for workers who haven't achieved much, but they give mod makers the option of not having to write biographies for every single person in the game.

Adam schrieb:Feb 08: Tag Team & Clique Incidents

In previous games backstage incidents were limited to one person with an optional 'target'. This has now been expanded, allowing for tag teams (or simply duos) and cliques to be involved.

This adds to the realism of the game, especially as it plays into backstage relationships more, but can also add an extra wrinkle to the user's handling of the locker room as he must punish all of the offenders equally. This can make for some interesting scenarios, particularly if one major bad influence is dragging his clique buddies into trouble that they otherwise probably wouldn't be involved in.

There are also new tag team and clique incidents that are specifically written to revolve around them using their numbers advantage backstage.

Feb 09: Canadian Breakdown

The Canadian game area has been altered so that The Prairies has now been split into three regions: Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

Feb 09: European Breakdown

The European game area has been altered so that The Mediterranean has now been split into four regions: France, Italy, Iberia, and South East Europe.

Feb 10: Generic Venues

A new feature added to the game is Generic Venues. The way this works is that the user does not have to pick a specific pre-made venue when holding a show, instead he can simply pick the region he wants to hold it in and select the Generic Venue button.

The capacity is considered to be around the number of fans that the promotion draws (i.e. you don't get charged extra for seats you wouldn't have filled, nor are you turning people away).

When viewing show histories, the game simply uses the region name in place of the venue (i.e. it would say "X were in Scotland" rather than "X were in Glasgow City Complex in Scotland"). Not having an exact venue named is really the only drawback of the system.

The advantages are threefold. Firstly, this removes a massive amount of work for mod makers as there's no pressure to add even one venue, let alone multiple venues for every region - you could even leave the entire location file blank without causing any issues. Secondly, it removes the annoyance of being stuck 'between tiers', where, for example, you can draw 2000 people but only have the options for a 1000 capacity arena or a 5000 capacity arena - you no longer have to choose between turning away half your fans or shelling out money for 3000 seats that you can't fill. Thirdly, for users who don't care about having a specific venue then this makes booking a show even quicker as you can just grab a generic venue each time.

Feb 10: Venue Hiring Costs

In previous games, venue hiring costs were done in tiers, so there were big jumps when moving over certain capacity levels. This has been changed so that all hiring costs are now relative to the venue's capacity. This is a small change, but makes for slightly easier financial management and removes what was a previously pretty arbitrary price jump.

Feb 11: Pregnancy

New to the game in 2016 is pregnancy, if only because apparently some people have been adding it in as an defined injury in previous games which is just wrong on so many levels.

Pregnancies work in a three stage manner. The initial announcement gives warning that the worker in question will be taking time off shortly. The worker then goes on maternity leave. Then, to the surprise of nobody but the most biologically challenged, the birth happens. The mother will remain on maternity leave for a short while after the birth too, for realism.

Feb 11: Backstage Influence Guide

As another small user-friendly touch, in a worker's Personal quick tab (i.e. the list on the right hand side of the Characters screen) the game now gives a guideline on whether he'd be a positive or negative influence in a locker room. This allows you to see at a glance whether you're dealing with a good egg, a bad apple, or some other food based metaphor. This saves you from having to visit their profile to look at their personality, potentially saving you a mighty four clicks of the mouse per character in total. TEW2016: fighting carpal tunnel syndrome one click at a time.

Feb 12: Body Types

Workers in TEW2016 now have specific body types. Each worker can be one of the following eight categorisations:

Average, Skinny, Toned, Muscular, Ripped, Flabby, Bulky and Obese

This feature is primarily because there simply aren't enough petty arguments when making mods and I think a spirited fifteen page debate over whether Bull Dempsey is flabby or bulky will raise the level of discourse on the various forums immeasurably. (NB: If you are reading this paragraph over at the EWB forums, please replace the words "Bull Dempsey" with "Neville", and "flabby or bulky" with "bulky or obese".)

These types are dynamic, shifting over time both due to ageing and because of the worker's actions. For example, some of the stories that were attached to weight changes in TEW2013, such as a worker letting themself go or putting on muscle mass, will now also impact their body type. There are also new stories specific to body type changes.

Not just a cosmetic feature, when changing body type the worker can also see an impact on his stats. For example, a worker who becomes Ripped will see his looks and star power rise, but may lose a little stamina due to the increased muscle mass. Body types can also offer clues as to a worker's personality and habits; for example, somebody who has become Flabby is likely to not be the hardest worker in the world, whereas somebody who is Ripped could be secretly juicing.

The new body type system has been added to the search facility in the various worker-related screens and is also visible next to their size rating on all screens too.

The conversion process sets everybody from a TEW2013 database to Average as there is no data from which to make an informed guess. However, you can mass edit body types.

Feb 12: Immortal Tag Teams

The Hall Of Immortals has been expanded and can now also hold legendary tag teams as well as singles wrestlers. The criteria for tag teams is different to singles wrestlers but still only allows the best of the best to get in. This is primarily a cosmetic feature, but as a lot of people are fans of tag team wrestling it's nice to have it in the game anyway.

Adam schrieb:Feb 15: Advanced Web Search

This is more of a utility than an actual feature, but it should prove very useful for a lot of players.

Added to the web site part of the game is a new advanced search facility. This new area allows the worker to type in any piece of text and the game will search throughout the game for it, returning a list of all the workers who are in any way associated with it.

This can be used for multiple purposes, but the main one is to address one of the long standing issues which is finding workers under alternate names. If you've been on the forums for any length of time you'll be aware that one of the most regular questions we get, especially for real world mods, is "I'm looking for X but I don't know what name he is under, who is he in this mod?". You can now type in the name you want (or even just part of the name) and the game will search for any mention of it in the following:

Default names
Default biographies
Contract names
Contract biographies
Title histories (i.e. the name the wrestler used when holding a title)
Alter ego names
Alter ego biographies
Tag team names

For example, if you were playing a real world mod you might type in "Conquistador" and you'd get a list that might look like this:

Jose Estrada Jr - mentioned in biography, mentioned in Alter Ego "Conquistador Uno"
Jose Luis Rivera - mentioned in biography, mentioned in Alter Ego "Conquistador Dos"
Adam Copeland - mentioned in Alter Ego "Edge" biography, mentioned in title history
Christian - mentioned in title history

And so on. You can click on any result to go straight to that worker's profile. You can search for any text term at all, so even if all that you remember is that a random CornellVerse bio mentioned someone being a world calibre softball player you could type in "softball" or even just "calibre" and you'd find them.

This is also useful if you're reading through title histories or match results and come across a name you don't recognise; rather than having to do some detective work you can simply type the name in and have the game list all possible candidates.

Hopefully this powerful utility will prove useful to a lot of players.

Adam schrieb:Feb 16: 3 vs 3 vs 3

This was asked for a surprising amount of times, so TEW2016 now includes a 3 vs 3 vs 3 match type.

Feb 16: 2013->2016 Converter

To confirm, TEW2016 will continue the tradition of having a converter that turns a database from the previous game into one for the current version.

Furthermore, this one has been enhanced to automatically find and fix some minor errors that may be in some mods, and will also 'best guess' to fill in some of the new pieces of data to save the mod maker some time.

Feb 16: Themed Web Site

Purely a fun little cosmetic touch, but on certain dates (including Christmas, New Years, and Halloween) the in-game web site has custom themed skins to reflect the time of year.