"A far more lucid description of management" Micro User Magazine

PLAYER MOTIVATION

With SaaP 2009 release 2 I've introduced a radical new approach to player management and motivation with a LISA-style AI interaction between the gamer-manager and the players. Currently this has been applied only to the pre-match, half-time and post match personal pep talks but the way in which users have since reacted to it encorages me to introduce it to training and confidence talks also in future releases. In the real world motivation and confidence building are as important to success as tactics and squad building but the implementation of that in the smgs has been ineffective at best. SaaP has tried as hard as most but the features have been repetitve and choices often unsuitable for the situations. Something better was needed. The answer has always been rather obvious - a LISA-style AI program - but the difficulty of writing such a program has frightened designers away. Until now!

When you choose to speak with a player in the dressing-room pep talks, the game offers you a text input box where you can type in any comment you care to make. The message you wish to convey, the form of language you want to use are both entirely up to you. You can ball the player out, you can praise him to the skies. It's up to you. The program then analyses the text looking for positive and negative keywords and phrases and calculates a motivational factor that is applied to the player's performance in the game and his overall confidence. The player's temperament and current confidence are taken into account. The squad team talks in the dressing room uses the more usual multiple choice system. There are hundreds of groups of options which take account of the type of match (league, cup, home-and-away tie etc) and the state of the game for you to pick from. This is the more traditional interaction. Check the thumbs to see the two screens.

SQUAD PRE-MATCH PEP TALK LISA "AI" INDIVIDUAL PEP TALK