I am very excited about the upcoming release of the first public beta version of OOTP Fantasy Leagues. What started as a custom two-page addition to Frank Esselink’s StatsLab mod has morphed into its own unique and challenging animal of a project. It’s one of my most ambitious personal development projects I’ve ever attempted, and I’ve tried a few.

What will the public 0.1 beta entail? I will release the code for interested users to download and install on their servers and then pretty much wait for the bugs and feedback to start rolling in. At this point and time, the site is feature complete for what I want in the 0.1 release, so I won’t be adding much, if anything, to the 1.0 final release. Just clean up what is there already if need be. For what I wanted to do and could accomplish time-wise this summer, I am delighted with the feature list thus far.

Working with John Rodriguez (Corsairs in the OOTP Forums) and the rest of the private BEBA and OOTP beta team gave me the chance to test drive the site, and it’s features and get some critical feedback from real users on what they’d need to use the mod daily. What we worked out and added to the 0.1 release adds, in my mind, at least, the most critical and vital scouting and management tools that are necessary for people to start enjoying this with their online leagues.

My ultimate hope and goal here is that the mod adds a new dimension of immersion and just plain fun to the running of the OOTP online league for their commissioners.

I already have a long list of possible additions. One might ask, though, why would you want to try and move this project from hobbyist work to full out development and release all within working and having a third child (which is in itself a full-time job sometimes too). Well, I guess it’s just in my nature to want to express myself. Anything that helps promote and can help to benefit a game that has given me many hours of fun and challenging distraction from life little complexities is well worth the effort to me.