Mystify Soccer - New web site launched!

New web site launched!

Welcome to the new look Mystify Soccer!

Mystify Soccer has been running for several years now with no changes to any aspect of it, either in terms of game play or the way the site looks. In fact the site was starting to look very dated indeed. Plus, from my own personal point of view, it was coded using code that I knew in the late 1990's and I have improved my own knowledge greatly during this time.

Some of you may be aware that I was building a major upgrade to the game and I started this about 4 years ago. I had a new design along with loads of new ideas and I was also implementing the ability for the game to run more teams from more countries. It would have been a massive improvement on the game as it is currently. The problem I had was a major lack of spare time to get all these improvements into the game within a decent time frame and I actually got a bit bored of doing it in the end. Plus, the way programming works, there is always a newer version to code in and it had become out of date before I even got it near launching!

So what I've decided to do is do things a bit more gradually, which will actually assist game players anyway as improvements will be implemented in stages. I still want to use all the ideas I had for the major upgrade eventually so I'm hopeful that you will start to enjoy the game more as time goes on.

The first stage of this gradual upgrade has been the web site (as you can hopefully see). All I have done is given it a better look and style so that it is a bit easier on the eye and slightly easier, in some cases, to use. The fundamental aspects of the game are exactly the same. Nothing has been changed in terms of how you teams are managed. However, there are a few simple changes to the web site that I have mentioned in another news article.

The reason that nothing in terms of game play has changed is simple. The web site is only part of the game structure. There is a back-end match engine, which, unfortunately at the moment, is still in its original code and that is my next assignment. This part of the game generates the 'match reports' which is why they still look horrible! This may be a big job so don't expect any changes to the game for quite a while. However, once I have done this and the web site and game engine are in code that is up-to-date then I will start thinking about adding things to the game. Please don't contact me with future ideas for the game as I have them in abundance already and it's very likely that you will be suggesting something I have thought of (or at least got an idea similar to) already. I have ideas for every aspect of the game but as there's so many, it will take time for me to get them integrated - this all depends on the amount of spare time I have too!

One quick thing that you may find missing is the archive of previous seasons' data. This data is currently only in HTML format which is quite useless for me to use within the new design. I had a choice of just converting it over (which would have been nice and simple) or getting the data into the database so I can format it any way I want. I chose the latter for reasons that will become obvious once it has been done. But the conversion is taking a while. You should start to see historical game data appear over the next few weeks (as I am doing this before the game engine code conversion) and I will start by matching the previous format so that you can see the final table and results for any season/division. Cup data will follow this and then I'll add a nice little feature for you to use (not saying what yet as I haven't thought it through 100%).

I hope you like the new format!