Hello, i'm a lawyer from Brazil with an idea, and little knowledge.

I have a concept football manager game, fully concepted, i have a book with ideas i managed to put together for the game.

Problem n° 1), i will need to edit a massive amount of database, how can i make my life easier.

History

-Media

-Events

Country

-League

-Team

-Player

-Future Players

Problem n° 2), i dont know nothing about programming. I saw something about Ruby and Phyton, and to stay away from C++, it's the best, but could make me frustrated.

Problem n° 3) As a football manager game, i will need to use players and team names, but i can't. Corprights, so i will need even more creative power to make some "fake" names.

How can i do anything? Where do i start?

Good Thing nº 1) I don't know anything! So i could make anything.

Good Thing nº 2) I'm not interested in engine 3d, or making anything move alone. I can't (and for now i won't) do that. I want a Text-based manager game (Think OOTP) or if that was hard only a timer and passing if anything important happened (red, yellow cards, goals, penalties)

Phyton+PyGame will make what i want?

Python should be an okay choice.. An heavily UI based like that might be hard to pull of tho...especially if you are alone and know nothing yet..

Since it will be heavily UI based as Grminshaw pointed out, you may consider making it web based with HTML, and using javascript and SQL to handle the back end. This option may not be beginner friendly though, because you will be working in 3 - 4 different "languages".

You may also consider using a language that has a drag and drop interface for UI, such as Microsoft Visual C#.

Don't worry about the names right away. For now you can use the real team names, and come up with your own names later if you release it.

hello faelcks,

I have two questions for you, first, do you want the game to be single-player or you want each team manager to be a real person, and second, do you want the game web based or not?

Python should be an okay choice.. An heavily UI based like that might be hard to pull of tho...especially if you are alone and know nothing yet..

Do you have any idea better? I have for now just the idea.

Since it will be heavily UI based as Grminshaw pointed out, you may consider making it web based with HTML, and using javascript and SQL to handle the back end. This option may not be beginner friendly though, because you will be working in 3 - 4 different "languages".

You may also consider using a language that has a drag and drop interface for UI, such as Microsoft Visual C#.

Don't worry about the names right away. For now you can use the real team names, and come up with your own names later if you release it.

Thanks, will make WAY easier to make. I'm thinking making the Spanish, Italian, Brazilian and English league.

hello faelcks,

I have two questions for you, first, do you want the game to be single-player or you want each team manager to be a real person, and second, do you want the game web based or not?

Answers:

1 - Completely Single Player.

2 - No web based. Working game(i hope) to windows.

Perhaps language isnt so important for this but the tools required to build the interface.

Have a look at .NET with Visual Studio and winforms
http://i.stack.imgur.com/8vXRc.png

or Java and Netbeans
http://i.ytimg.com/vi/LFr06ZKIpSM/0.jpg

These tools should allow you to create the interface and flow for your game and then wire up the logic using some pretty common languages.

You already found out you cant use real names, so instead of manually typing in a huge amount of fantasy-names you can reduce your work by making a function that randomly combines syllables into names and then keep those for the duration of one game.
For a manager game you dont need to use a fast but ugly language, so I would just use the least contrived language you can find.

Sensible Soccer on the Megadrive just changed vowels in player names (so Cantona became Centona IIRC), and the clubs were named after the region if they were not already (so Arsenal became Highbury). You could manually edit the names anyway, to change them to the correct ones, no copyright/trademark issues involved then.

Appeal to an American audience by not saying "GOAL!!!" but saying "he struck the soccerball with a foot rocket straight into the netbag in overtime for a one to nil statistic" instead in the commentary though.

You already found out you cant use real names, so instead of manually typing in a huge amount of fantasy-names you can reduce your work by making a function that randomly combines syllables into names and then keep those for the duration of one game.
For a manager game you dont need to use a fast but ugly language, so I would just use the least contrived language you can find.

The problem is:

My idea of game is a Historic Soccer teams.

To throw the idea is going from 2000-2013, passing in the main moments in every year.

-Juventus Falling to the Second Division

-Parmalat Bankruptcy

So, my job-list (and where i'm completely blind)

-Skeleton (teams, players stats, at this point dont need to be real, could be place_holders)

-Make how the games(matches) will work.

-UI

And that's what i want help. I'm a TRULY beginner.

First you need a match engine, pass it 2 teams and the match engine returns the result as a black box (i.e. callers don't know how it comes up with the answer).

Start with random results, then tweak based on:

attack rating vs. defence rating

shots on target vs. goalkeeper ability

midfield playmaking -> shots on target

possession vs. closing down ability

possession in own half vs. possession in key areas

fouls vs. free kick ability

etc.

should give you something to start thinking about...