Think You Have What it Takes to Save the NHL?  Test Your Management Skills in NHL: Eastside Hockey Manager

by Louis Bedigian

“We have a character on our packaging that perfectly reflects what our aim is with our games – the player of the game is the star of it.”

When the going gets tough, the game industry gets tougher.  While North America has abandoned all hope for a 2004-2005 hockey season, the game industry is coming on strong with several great hockey games to sink your broken teeth into.

This year we get the chance to experience hockey from a different point of view – the view of a manager.

NHL: Eastside Hockey Manager is the first hockey game where players must guide the team and defeat opponents through good management.  Clearly the real-life NHL managers don’t know how to run things – otherwise there’d be a season going on right now.  We can’t do anything about that, but we can take charge in this game and prove that, if given the chance, we could make it work.

Before you get sucked into Eastside Hockey Manager and lose yourself in statistics, read what Miles Jacobson (Managing Director/CEO, Sports Interactive) and Risto “Riz” Remes (Games Designer, Sports Interactive) have to say about the game and its creation.

Sports Management is a new genre to players outside of Europe. Start by introducing the genre, and explain how it differs from the sports games we're used to playing.

Miles: Imagine taking Fantasy Sports that one step louder, with you fully in control. What our game engines do is accurately replicate a sports match, and give realistic results via a watchable play by play system according to the line up of the team that you play, and are playing. Our games though are much more than that, trying to replicate every stage of managing a sporting team, from coaching, through trading, through balancing the books.

We cut out the boring stuff, like building stadiums and setting ticket prices, because that's not what a manager would do.

You play in your own world, with your own timelines too, and for as many years as you want to, so you can really build your own dynasty. NHL: Eastside Hockey Manager isn't just about the NHL though, and, like all of our games, there are multiple countries leagues available to play
as, so you can not only play as your favorite NHL team, but as one of your favorite Canadian major junior teams as well, with WHL, OHL and QMJHL, or start a fresh with any of the 18 leagues in the game, all of which have an army of researchers providing objective stats for over 10,000 players and staff members. It's more than just a game – it's a way of life.

Attack of the hockey blobs!

NHL Eastside Hockey Manager was originally conceived and produced as a shareware title. How do you from that (shareware) to this (a complex PC sports game)?

Riz: Yes, the original EHM was done as a freeware game, as it was only a little something I was doing with my friends back in Finland on my free time aside from my university studies. I learned a lot of things while doing the freeware game about sports management games and what makes them tick. I also learned a great deal from all the different people who visited our website and gave us feedback when developing the freeware game.

Moving on from the freeware game to a complex commercial sports game like NHL EHM was luckily not something that just happened over one night. SI's Head of Development Marc Vaughan had been in touch with me for quite some time before I actually moved over to London, UK, and I had picked his brain on different things and discussed the possibility of moving under their wing.

With Sports Interactive, the game was on a whole new level as it would no longer just revolve around one single league but it would rather simulate a whole world of hockey with multiple leagues running at their own pace and players and staff moving globally across leagues. And with SI, the game got the benefit of a solid sports management game codebase from their previous games that we were able to take and modify to our hockey needs. Not to mention all the talent that was made available for the project and the fact that all the years of experience that SI had in their staff were in the same office to help out if we needed a hand.

Back in Finland I was coding everything on my own so naturally it was new for me to work with a team. The EHM team eventually grew up to 4 full time programmers plus some other staff helping out at times as well so I no longer had to concentrate on all aspects of the coding and could put my efforts on the hockey specific code like the in-game engine that simulates a game between two teams.

How much has changed since the game's development began?

Riz: A lot has definitely changed during the development. The old freeware game was done in a different programming language, so we left the old code alone and used it only as a reference for ideas and functionality and to remind us how to do some things and how not to do certain things.

When we started the NHL EHM project, it was mostly converting the existing codebase to work with a new sport and the new rules and league structures of hockey. We also needed to upgrade the user interface system, as it was a bit dated at that point.

One of the biggest things was naturally the core of the game, the in-game engine (or the match engine, as its called on the soccer side), which needed to be re-built to simulate hockey games. When the old freeware game had a similar in-game engine and play-by-play, it was still very simplified and limited.

With NHL EHM, we took it to whole new depths and went ahead and made it even more detailed than the engine that was used in the older soccer management games. This enabled us to simulate all the action second by second and track individual players and the puck as the play progressed and to draw shot charts and give "snapshots" of the crucial moments of action. While we cannot yet give players a moving real time 2D presentation of the games, we can give the a lot of statistical information during the game as well as live text commentary as the events unfold and the tools to analyze goals and penalties with the overhead snapshots to see who was out-of-position when a goal was scored and where the goals were scored from.

Information is key.

Is Risto Remes, the creator of the shareware version, involved with the development of the game?

Miles: Very much so, hence I passed some of these questions onto him to answer! Riz is lead on the game, it's his baby, and he uses Sports Interactive tools and engine code to help him in his quest to continue creating the ultimate Hockey management titles, much as we have tried to do for more than a decade with our Soccer  titles.

Riz: Yes, I'm very much here, doing the same thing as with the freeware game. Designing, coding, talking to people on the forums on how to improve things and what to add next. :)

Statistics and the player lineup are an important part of any sports game. Changes to the league can be made at the last minute – how do you decide when to stop making changes?

Miles: That depends on the gold master date. We stop adding new code to the games around a week before going gold, and concentrate on fixing stuff after that point. Data normally gets edited till the last possible moment.

Riz: It also depends on the scale of the changes. Small rule changes are usually easy to implement and test but bigger changes need more time to prepare. We usually get our researchers to provide documentation of their league and league rules for the upcoming season so we can code it in and then they can test that it all works in the game as it should. As Miles said, data changes can be done pretty much up to the last minute so we can update rosters and player attributes until the last minute if necessary.

Again, trade deadlines are usually good milestones for us to try and "freeze" roster changes so all the leagues have their rosters right as they were at that given time.

What kinds of changes will players be able to make? Can you pick and choose the players you want from any league featured in the game?

Miles: Yes, and some from leagues that aren't featured in the game. Our team of researchers around the world want to try and get every pro and semi-pro Hockey player in the world into the game, and that is our aim as well. If you are creating a virtual world, you need to have a world of players in the game, not just those from one country. You never know, one day we might even see a Brit doing well in the NHL. But I won't hold my breath.

Riz: As a general manager of a team, you can pretty much do anything a real GM might do with the same freedom and the same limitations as in real life.

You can hire and fire backroom staff to bring in better coaches and scouts if you wish. You can lease players that are not in your plans and sign free agents from all around the world. You can trade players, rights to players, draft picks and cash with other teams in your league to get better players or dump salary if you wish. You can scout potential stars in the junior leagues, European leagues or even the international tournaments such as the World Championships, World Junior Championships or the Olympics. And once the draft comes up, you can go through the full draft (9 rounds NHL, more in some Canadian junior leagues) and draft any eligible player available in your hockey universe while trying to secure those hot prospects your scouts found.

Or, you can go for that older European guy in the later rounds and see if he can step in immediately or just for kicks draft the odd Brit or Danish player for the fun of it.

Naturally, the GM's duties vary depending on if you are managing an NHL team or a European team, as the European leagues do not have player trading like NA leagues, but rather build teams by signing free agents in the off-season. And that's all just the GM side of things. You can also handle coaching in the game if you wish and set all the lines from even strength to special teams to your liking, set all the team and line tactics or even set individual instructions for some players to make most of their talents. And you can also try and help your players develop by changing the practice routines of the team.

“We have a character on our packaging that perfectly reflects what our aim is with our games – the player of the game is the star of it.”—Miles, when asked about the cover athlete.

How did the NHL end up in the title?

Miles: The NHL have been very supportive of us and our obsession to entertain Hockey and management sim fans, and when we were awarded an official license from them, it made sense to add them into the title of the game.

Besides being an official mark of approval, what should the NHL's connection mean to gamers?

Miles: It shows that they feel the game is authentic, as we went through a long approval process (with thanks to Visual Concepts).

Riz: And because of the license, we have been able to use all the proper team logos and player pictures (where available) for the NHL teams and their players.

Will all of the NHL's teams be present in the game?

Riz: All the 30 NHL teams are featured in the game with their real players, staff, logos and player pictures. So you can take full control of your favorite NHL franchise.

Thank you for your time guys!