ON-GOING DEVELOPMENT

About three years ago I was talking to the designer of one of the best "numbers" smgs when he suddenly said to me "I can't think what next to put into the game. It seems to me that almost everything that's relevant has been included already".

I almost choked over my coffee, well maybe it was a beer, with disbelief that anyone could consider the current smgs anywhere near the limit of their development.

I doubt that the best smg, in my opinion SaaP of course, is any more than 10% of the way towards the ultimate game. Even without ideas of Star Trek Holodeck style simulation with 3D hologram players and stadia and AI "people" that are indistiguishable from humans in their behaviour, we're so far away from a realistic representation of the real world that I'm sometimes embarrassed by the use of the word "simulation".

Whatever, there's a long, long way to go before there's nothing more to add to these games.

Because SaaP attempts to mimic the real world rather than use some simple arithmetic representation, many aspects of the real world make more sense in the game. I can think of so many new features to add to the game that I wonder whenever I'll have the time to introduce them.

To maximise the time spent on introducing these new ideas, then the game is developed continuously. Virtually every day is spent adding new features and the results published on the SaaP Online Members' page about every six weeks. In this way the game evolves rather than moves ahead in great jumps every couple of years. There's much less duplication (when a game is released as a new game it at least has to look as if it's been designed from scratch even if 90% of it is the same as the old game :>)) and more of the development time is used in genuine advances.

In games of this complication, bugs are inevitable - human beings were never intended to perform with the level of logical accuracy demanded by modern applications programming. Many of those bugs are only found out because thousands of users spend thousands of hours taking the game to all sorts of extremes. The regular publication of SaaP means that these bugs can be fixed and introduced quickly rather than sit around for the two years until the next release.

If new ideas come to light, often from customer feedback, then these can be introduced into the game within weeks rather than years. Changes in rules, competitions, squads etc. can also be included in good time. Producing regular upgrades allows all these to be added with little delay.

Of course, it's the Internet that allows us to do this. It wouldn't be much point making all these changes if we couldn't get it out to users. The immediacy of the Internet allows us to deliver the upgrades, expansions, bug fixes etc. hours after we've made and tested them. The results are uploaded to the SaaP Online web site for users to download whenever it suits them.