Update v0.11.0: Recruiting gems, saved filters, UI improvements, and Mac news

For this update, I focused on improving the UI experience in several areas, but also added one nice feature that should add some excitement to recruiting. Now, you can find gems! These are players who are underrated by the recruiting experts, so you can find a 3-star who's more like a 4-star, or 4-star who should really be a 5-star, and more. These players are interspersed throughout the rankings, and will be revealed to be a 'gem' at 50% scouting. Some gems will see higher gains than others, and overall these account for less than 10% of total players, but now there's more reward for digging through recruits, and higher chance of a real impact player coming to a mid-tier school.

I've also made a few much needed quality of life improvements to recruiting, specifically for filters. First, now you can more easily change the position filter for recruiting in a dropdown in the table. This will override the one configured in the recruit filtering bar, but makes it much easier to switch between positions. Secondly, you can now 'save' recruiting filters to be reused later. This means you can configure a '5 star recruits in Ohio' filter, save it, and easily reuse that filter in all recruiting pages at any time. These can also be overridden later or deleted.

I've also done a ton of little improvements to the UI. This includes much more consistent behavior when clicking 'back' so the previous page's section is saved, a better recruiting table which should fit more easily on smaller screen sizes, a nice coach card preview when hiring coaches (seen below), and tons more. Check the full list of changes at the bottom of this post.

Mac release announcement

Finally, I'd like to provide an update on the Mac release that many are anticipating. In the past, I said I was aiming for a May timeframe. However, I've run into several issues and it's hard to know how much further effort is needed to fix all of them. After spending a weekend trying to debug the issues and not coming any closer to the fixes, I've made the difficult decision to postpone the Mac release until after Early Access.

My goal is to make Football Coach: College Dynasty the best game possible by the time the 2023 football season rolls around. To that end, I've decided to use my limited time to work on the Windows edition and ensure the best experience when the game comes out of Early Access this fall. To those waiting for the Mac release, I know this is disappointing. There are several ways to run the game on Mac via emulation or bootcamp, and I may outline some of these approaches in a future post. I hope you understand my decision, and my goal is still to bring the game to Mac eventually!

Improvements / changes

General:

• Improved back button experience on many pages
• Improved player and coach award cards
• Added links to Hall of Fame and Ring of Honor in player page banners
• Added projected depth to players transferring table
• Added coach card to hire coach dialog

Recruiting:

• Added recruiting 'gems' mechanic for underrated players
• Added saved recruiting filters
• Added quick filter for positions in recruiting
• Added tooltip for custom recruiting order and commit precedence
• Changed colors for recruiting actions so higher quality actions stand out more
• Capped number of five stars to 35 HS and 10 JUCO players
• Adjust recruit ratings for OL and QB positions slightly

Thanks for playing!