World Basketball Manager 2 (WBM2) will be the sequel to the successful series of basketball management games.

If you are not familiar with WBM, you should know that is a basketball strategy game that covers all serious basketball action around the world with 100+ national and international tournaments, 1.200+ teams, 20.500+ basketball players and 1.300+ managers.

The accurate representation of the basketball world forces the players to make the same decisions and face the same problems as their real life counterparts. It deals not only with the sport aspect of the game, but also with financial, managerial, administrative, training, psychological and PR situations that arise in the everyday life of a basketball manager.

The biggest success of WBM is the real time match engine that produces realistic results and accurate match statistics, using a genetic algorithm for the A. I.

Another huge plus of the game is the big network of researchers that help in data and tournament updates. The game is available in 12 languages: English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Spanish and Turkish.

To learn more about the current version of the game please visit www.wbmgame.com

We have also released a Tycoon version of the game which you can download and play from the official website www.wbmtycoon.com

World Basketball Manager 2 will be a completely new game, but will continue to develop as an old school manager game.

We have already spent thousand of hours and resources on this project. Right now we have finished 75% of the project and we need the necessary funds to give us the final push to complete the game.

All the funds will go to for the development of the new improved and friendly user interface and the new 2D match engine. We have already created new code and database that make the game run faster (New game initialization in WBM2 takes only 5 seconds!).

A first version of the game will be ready in Summer 2014 and will run on Windows and MacOS .

Here are some screens of what is already developed for WBM2:

New interface is 100% more user friendly. These are the main improvements:  
 1. The Navigation tree. From here you can have access to all database and game screens in a tree view. When you don’t need it, you can just hide the Navigation tree to gain more space for the info on the screen.

  2. Tabs. So now when you see for example a Team’s roster Physical Attributes, you have easy access to all other categories.

  3. Navigation icons for all different pages of the element you are viewing. If you see a Club for example, you get Roster, Departments, Training, Schedule etc in icons beside the open page. This works additionally to the Tabs and the Tree and the old functionality for faster browsing.

  4. It is resizable, so it adjusts automatically to your screen resolution.

The Visual Match Engine
The game already features an incredibly well-balanced, real-time match algorithm, with realistic results and challenging A.I. 

All the player and manager attributes are calculated during the match. And there are also special considerations including match’s crucial moments, clutch players, match importance, player temperaments, traditional enemy teams and much more. 
The managers control lineups, offensive and defensive tactics, play speed etc.

The match action features live commentary and ambient sound that responds to crowd attendance, crowd temperament, match importance, as well as the events in the course of the game which creates a perfectly realistic match atmosphere and loads of live data are displayed in full detail.

Our plan is to create a visual 2D match engine that will also present to the user the player movements on the court, in order to be able to see, not only statistically but also visually, what is working and what is not with his team’s offense and defense plans.

Other major improvements in the game engine:

• Ability to transfer manager data from WBM to WBM2, so that you can continue your current career in the new game.
  
• A More active transfer market.
  
• Teams will keep more native players in their rosters.
  
• NBA style players trades.
  
• The game will keep stats and news histories for Managers, Players, Teams, Tournaments and Countries for ever. That means that you can see a boxscore 20 seasons back!
  
• A More realistic players' worth rating system.
  
• More detailed financials for clubs.
  

The 2D Animation Editor

This is the main tool we use in order to create the key frames of the game animations and the managers' attack systems playbook. Later the users will be able to use this in order to create their own attack systems.

The Online Data Editor (already running in beta mode)This is the main tool we have created for the research team to update the game database. We have already used it for the database of WBM 2014 and the feedback we received from the researchers was great.

Here you can read more on how the online data editor works: 
http://www.wbmgame.com/files/WBMOnlineEditor.pdf

From the first day WBM has been a community project. 

When we finished the first game design, the game was asking for a database that included more than 100 national and international club and national team tournaments, 1.100 teams, 20.000 players and 1.200 managers. Also 30 characteristics per country, 25 characteristics per team, 51 characteristics per basketball player and 10 characteristics per manager. Immediately came clear to us that we would never be able to create this huge database without a lot of help.

The first thing we did was to start building an online community of game fans and the first piece of code we wrote, was for a data editor that the community would use in order to collect the data. Also we created a localization kit for the community.
In a magical way, WBM became immediately a community project and today WBM includes the biggest basketball database the world has ever seen in a game and is available in 12 languages. We just can’t thank enough our community for all the help they have offered to the game!

Now with our crowd funding project we have the opportunity to get the community involved even more.

“World Basketball Manager” story goes many-many years in the past. Back then we were a bunch of gamers that loved to play Old School soccer manager games. But since basketball is a very popular sport and the national team and clubs have won many international titles, we always wanted to find and play a basketball management game.

As hard core sport manager game fans, we already knew that basketball would be the perfect theme for such a game.  All sport manager games are after all statistical simulators of the sport they represent and basketball is a sport that statistics give a clear view of the game and why a team wins or loose. In basketball, statistics and evaluations of a game really matters compared to other sports. If you take soccer for example, a team could have 80%-20% possession of the ball, 30 -1 shots on target, 20-5 fouls, 15-1 corners etc. and still lose the game cause the opponent team managed to score a goal in the only corner they took.

This could never happen in a basketball game. The team with the most rebounds and better ratings in field goals, fouls etc. is for sure the winner.

So we decided that it would be great to create a videogame that uses the same statistics that the real life professionals of basketball use in order to analyze a game and the performance of the players.

Thanks for reading through our project and for supporting independent developers.

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