Happy Memorial Day! A new development build (21-06) of Old School Football Coach is now publicly available, which, in addition to various bug fixes, includes 2 major features!

Player Fatigue

The football players on your team have always had a stamina attribute, but until now it didn’t have a major impact on their performance. That all changes with this update. Players will now get fatigued as they play, and as their condition worsens so will their other abilities. You can combat this by temporarily benching your tired players and give them time to rest and recover.

UI Scaling

Previously, playing the game on a small screen or high resolution display could make the UI elements small and hard to read. This build adds a UI scale adjustment to the Game Options. It is now possible to make the UI elements 1.5x or 2x bigger! This may seem like a small change, but behind the scenes a lot of code needed to be written to make this possible. Though, do note that the game doesn’t play well (and will warn you) when the UI is scaled with the window set at a low resolution. This effectively reduces the amount of space that UI elements have to fit inside of, which some screens and menus in the game can’t yet accommodate.

Development build (21-05) of Old School Football Coach is now publicly available! Notable changes include:

New Features / Improvements

• In career mode, recruits can now have a new interest: “Recent Success”. In other words, if recent success is important to a recruit, you can influence them more towards your team if you’ve been doing well lately. This interest is also different from the other ones because the recruit’s feelings can change on it week-to-week depending on how your team is doing. Your positive influence might turn into a negative influence if you start losing a lot of games!
• It’s now possible to separately select offense, defense, and special teams skill when generating new team rosters. This gives a little more variety because it’s now possible to end up with teams that have, for example, a really good offense but bad defense.
• Additional variety has been added to player images.
• A little polish was added to the team selection screen before a game. It now shows a preview of what each team’s uniform looks like.
• AI coaches no longer call user-created plays. This prevents the ability to make broken plays that the opposing team might try to run occasionally and always fail.
• It is no longer possible to delete built-in plays. This helps prevent getting into a state where all plays have been deleted and need to be recreated.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where, when players were manually added to a team’s depth chart, they might always be assigned as a QB instead of the desired position.
• Fixed an issue where the game would become temporarily unresponsive if new teams were being mass generated. The “Generate Random Teams” dialog will now show progress as new teams are being made.
• Fixed an crash that could happen while editing the roster of an existing team in the League Management menu.
• Fixed an hang that could happen when a custom league had fewer teams than what was needed to fill the playoffs in career mode.
• Fixed a crash that could happen when generating a league with 20+ conferences.
• Fixed a crash that could happen when creating a new team and assigning a non-number to the school’s enrollment field.
• Fixed a scheduling bug in career mode that could result in too few conference games being scheduled for a team

A new early access development build (2021-04) of Old School Football Coach is now publicly available! Notable changes include:

Postseason Games

There is now support for postseason games and they are highly customizable! You can configure the number of playoff spots available in your league and decide of if only the top-ranked teams make it in, or if conference champions have an automatic bid. You can also decide if you want to create your own bowl games and how teams get selected for them as well.

Other Improvements and Fixes

• Performance optimizations have been put in place when calculating team rankings between weeks. This reduces the time spent waiting for a week to complete and the next week to start. The performance of these calculations scale with the number of teams in the league, so it is now more feasible to have leagues with a larger number of teams in them.
• Some minor visual enhancements have been added to the field and player animations. For example, there is now an animation for when a tackled player stands back up.
• Various bug fixes.

Be sure to check out the new gameplay trailer, best viewed in full screen mode!

Another new development build of Old School Football Coach is publicly available! Notable changes include:

New Features

• Conference championship games have been implemented in career mode. At the end of the regular season the top two teams in each conference will be matched up for a conference championship game.
• It is now possible to edit conferences in the League Management menu in addition to creating and deleting them.
• Penalties can now be declined.
• In career mode, the home page got a little bit of a facelift and now also shows conference standings.

Other Improvemetns

• Major performance optimizations have been put in place when generating new teams and starting new careers. Specifically the game is now up to 7 times faster at generating players, depth charts, recruits, and putting together league schedules. The performance of these activities scales with the number of teams in the league, so it is now more feasible to have leagues with a larger number of teams in them.
• School generation is no longer prone to making a bunch of schools in the same state. It now spreads schools throughout the 50 states a little better.

Bug Fixes

• It is now possible to control players during kickoffs.
• Fixed a bug in career mode where sometimes game results weren’t recorded properly after the first season was played.
• Players no longer keep their stats during a play that had a penalty accepted.
• Fixed an issue where accepting a penalty could move the ball to the other side of the field.
• Fixed a rare crash that could happen in career mode while simulating league games between weeks.
• When playing an exhibition game, switching leagues no longer breaks the ability to control players.

A new development build of Old School Football Coach is now publicly available! This update largely focuses on new features and improvements, listed below.

Remappable Keybindings

It’s now possible to configure in-game controls from the Settings menu. Right now this only supports keyboard keys, but controller support is a planned feature for the future.

Control the Snap

While on offense and using the standard control method, it is now possible to control when the ball gets snapped. Previously your team would automatically snap the ball about 3 seconds after the players were set, but It’s now possible to snap the ball earlier if you’re in a hurry or much later if need to run down the clock. By default this action is mapped to the ‘F’ key, but is also configurable in the Settings menu.

Play Clock

Old School Football Coach now has a play clock. This was a big gap in previous builds, making it possible for players to stay in the play selection screen for as long as they wanted in order to drain the game clock. The play clock now ensures the game keeps moving along.

Introduction of Penalties

A play clock doesn’t do much good unless there are consequences when time runs out. Therefore, a framework for penalties was put into place this build, with Delay of Game being one of two penalties supported so far. The other penalty in place is Defenseive Offsides. Without these two penalties it’s pretty easy for the player to come up with game-breaking strategies, and thus the implementation of these two penalties was prioritized first. I expect more types of penalties to come in a future build. One gap that still exists in the penalty framework is the ability to decline them. Support for declining penalties is also a planned feature for a future build.

Other Improvements

• The current ball yardline is now shown on the scoreboard.
• The announcer will now announce when there a turnover on downs or flag on the play.
• It is now possible to access the game menu while on the play selection screen.

Old School Football Coach is now available for early access on itch.io! The game is very playable in it’s current state, but I’ll be continuing development and delivering additional features and improvements in the future. Those who purchase the early access will be supporting development and will receive updates at no additional charge!

This is the new website for Old School Football Coach! Old School Football Coach is an in-development American college football PC game in the sports management simulation genre. You can call your team’s plays and do your best to lead them to victory. For a more in-depth experience, the game also offers a career mode where you can recruit new players, set up depth charts, and other activities you would expect from a college football coach.

I intend to add additional content to this site over time, such as pictures, videos, and additional blog posts as development continue. Stay tuned!