ZenGM Blog

This is about the trade finding algorithm, not the trade AI itself.

Football GM has long deserved some updates to the core of the game.

In last week's blog post about historical stats, I mentioned a few things that were missing.

It's almost a year since real players were added to Basketball GM.

Editing settings in a league has always been a little disjointed.

Positions in Basketball GM are determined by player ratings.

If you've been keeping a close eye on the changelog you may have noticed some work done by @domini7.

As the maker of basketball, football, and hockey simulation video games, sometimes I get amused by all the silly little differences between the major American pro sports leagues.

The "real player development determinism" (RPDD) setting has existed for a little while now, but it behaves somewhat unintuitively.

New feature: customizable tiebreakers for where teams rank in the standings!

It's common to want to know the history between two teams.

I started working on Basketball GM back when I was in college, in 2008.

In Real Players leagues, player ratings are based on player stats.

Happy New Year!

Following up to the recent updates that added a lot of detail to historical trades, today I added two new frivolities, in a brand new Trades section: Biggest Trades: Trades involving the best players and prospects.

When you make a trade in Basketball GM or Football GM, a summary of that trade is logged and shows up in the transactions list and the news feed.

I just deployed an update including a completely re-designed league settings page.

Today I released two improvements based on last month's player mood update related to how the AI re-signs its players, in both Basketball GM and Football GM.

For some reason, I decided to go through my history of blog posts, Reddit posts, and git commits and retroactively create a full changelog of Basketball GM back to the first beta of the web-based version in 2013.

I just added a fun new feature to leagues with God Mode enabled.

Portland fans, have you ever wondered what would happen if this draft went differently?

I just added a trade deadline to Basketball GM and Football GM.

Basketball GM has always had a concept of player mood.

Basketball Reference has a lot of cool features.

If you watched the 2020 NBA All-Star Game or The Basketball Tournament, you're familiar with the Elam Ending, an exciting and creative new idea in the basketball world.

Different people play Basketball GM in different ways.

Back in the old days, there was no way to switch your team in Basketball GM.

Generating player contracts is tricky.

Basketball GM and Football GM now have jersey numbers for players!

Basketball GM has long supported customizing the names and countries of randomly generated players, which is useful for people making custom league files.

One of the fun things about Basketball GM is that you can view the entire source code to the game, which opens up a level of modding and customization that is matched by few other games.

Football GM has been in an interesting place in 2020.

Elliot Strauss has done it again!

New feature!

Today I added a bunch of fun new features to Basketball GM and Football GM.

Today I added a News Feed to Basketball GM and Football GM.

Last month when I added real historical rosters, I didn't go all the way back to the beginning of the league in 1947, I stopped in 1956.

After you've played several years in a league, it can be fun to go to Tools > Frivolities and ask questions like "which player has the most relatives?"

Now that Basketball GM has real rosters back to 1956, it's possible to make all kinds of fun fictional rosters using real players.

Part of the fun of using real rosters back to 1956 is watching league rules change over time.

Update 2020-05-11: This is no longer in beta, you can play it on the main site.

Last week I released real players in Basketball GM, based on current rosters.

Basketball GM has always been made up of randomly generated players on fake teams.

Basketball GM and Football GM can be played at whatever speed you want.

Players in Basketball GM and Football GM now may be assigned a college when they are generated.

This has nothing to do with basketball.

Happy New Year!

In sports games like Madden and NBA 2k, teams generally have a rating on a 0-100 scale.

Update 2019-11-13 - Everything in this blog post is now officially released!

Today I released new versions of Basketball GM and Football GM that contain some improvements to injuries.