The Long, Slow Journey of Making an Olympics Game

[SecretAgentMan 37]

INTRO
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Olympians have their journeys. We hear about them only occasionally, fleeting stories that pop up when their sports catch the world's attention, and then off they go. But they are constantly, slowly, bit by bit, striving towards a dream. I also have an Olympic dream. However, I am already at the age where I no longer  have a realistic chance to qualify for the Olympics in most sports. Besides, I've never been that great of an athlete anyways, and I have like, a job and kids and all that other fun stuff that goes with most people's adulthood. So my Olympic dream is a little bit different. I want to make the ultimate Olympics sim/manager game. I want players to be able to take control of a country, develop a roster of athletes, and rocket to the top of the medal table. I want players to be able to bottle up a little bit of that Olympic energy and magic and release it whenever they want. I want to make something fun that I would enjoy playing. But I also hope to find others that would enjoy the same sort of endeavor and share it with them, too.

This isn't a new journey. I first started learning how to program in 2010 for the express purpose of making a Winter Olympics game. Eventually it morphed into a Summer and Winter Game. I have, on a number of occasions, run decent sims of the Olympics that I have been happy with. What I haven't ever been happy with, though, is the "career mode", where you would go through the grind of making your chosen country's roster of Olympians better and lead them up the medal table. And, like many journeys, it tends to fall off the pace at times and then ramp up into high gear when the Olympics come around. That's where this thread comes in.

I am hoping to slowly, methodically, rebuild my game' from the ground up. My goals are simple. I want to accomplish one task (even if it's a small one) per month, and I want to update/improve one of my many datasets once every...let's say two weeks to be safe. I plan to post about it here, in the hopes that public proclamations will help encourage me to keep my efforts going more regularly. I am also hoping that I will find some others along the way who are interested in playing such a game themselves- it would, after all, be nice to share this with people someday.

So please feel free to follow along, and I hope to keep you updated on my long, slow journey!
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GOALS
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September 2024 Main Goal
-Make my opening title screen fully sizable for a variety of monitor sizes

September 2024 Dataset Goals
-Archery Dataset Updated
-Alpine Skiing (Slalom) Dataset Updated

(I am giving myself until September for these first goals because just posting about and watching the Olympics has kept me very busy as of late, and I have to knuckle down on my actual job in the coming weeks)
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STANDARD PROMO
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if you like what you see and want to be updated when I have the game ready for release, please sign up here:  https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfbCUqoLWr4u59JGoJTy-TwQAKSVPk2VG3G0PvpSk0n2UVy1g/viewform?usp=sf_link

[SecretAgentMan 37]

 My first "goal" update isn't due until the end of the month on this project, but I have completed a couple of databases in August, so I thought I would share those. This is a detailed process because I am trying to add all 206 IOC nations into the databases (I previously had just 60), and because I am also trying to make the data more robust in many ways. I completed Archery and Artistic Swimming (formerly known as synchronized swimming).

Here are the top 20 in Archery (which is responsible for 5 gold medal events in each Olympics), and in Artistic Swimming, which is responsible for 2 gold medal events)

Reminder: 99 is MAX

               
Worth pointing out in Artistic Swimming that Russia is in 5th despite having been banned from competition entirely for the last 2 years. That's how dominant they were before!

 

STANDARD PROMO
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if you like what you see and want to be updated when I have the game ready for release, please sign up here:  https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfbCUqoLWr4u59JGoJTy-TwQAKSVPk2VG3G0PvpSk0n2UVy1g/viewform?usp=sf_link