I think I want both!
There’s 4 main models I see for F1 management games:
- Fully offline: you can play with no network connection, against virtual rivals only
- Fully online: you play against a full grid of humans, usually in real-time, i.e. with scheduled races and real-time clocks for how long things take
- Pseudo-online: you play against a full grid of humans, in a fully public league system, but it’s a replay of what “similar level” opponents already did, i.e. they won’t react to you, they are on rails
- Online with friends: you create your own private game, and invite your friends to play with you; as the “owner” of the game, you have the responsibility for advancing time and staying in sync
The 3rd of these is my least favorite – although there are very popular games that are run like this. The upsides are that you are technically competing against humans, without the complication of synchronizing with other players, i.e. having to wait. However, it’s not really human – it’s purely an illusion. There’s no social or community aspect, and no real visible difference between this and racing against fully virtual opponents.
The 2nd option is interesting, and maybe something I’d consider later. I used to play HatTrick, a popular football management game, that worked exactly like this. What was great about it is that there is genuine community. There were set match times through the week, and players would set up their instructions before each match. You played with the same people, often for a while if you didn’t get promoted or relegated, and there were in-game forums and such like.
There are F1 games that run like this and they are active and popular. However, I think there’s a key and obvious reason why this works for football but not F1: leagues! In football, leagues are the de-facto structure around the world. In motorsport, there are junior formulas, but it’s not the same. I don’t think it’d have much appeal to be in some junior formula and try to work your way up through some kind of promotion structure. There’s another huge problem, which is that the first players will always have and maintain an advantage over new joiners, which basically means that the hierarchy is strongly entrenched. You either need a way of periodically resetting to a level playing field (which is not fair to the players who built up their advantage) or you have a real risk that newer players will hit a ceiling and lose interest.
I think option 1, for this type of game, for the typical type of player, is essentially mandatory. You get to play at your own pace, the game is balanced (if the virtual players are written fairly), there’s no matchmaking problems of any kind. It’s also relatively straightforward to build, because everything just runs on the player’s device, with local storage. I think I want to build for mobile, maybe also with support for desktop or web. I can see this being something you might play to take the stress and boredom out of commuting, so it’d be great to play on the stereotypical train in a tunnel/underground metro.
I’d also like to offer option 4. This is how classic Championship Manager type games used to work; you play with friends, you all start from the same starting point. This solves the “perpetual leagues” problem, where people accumulate insurmountable advantages just through getting there first. Typically sync in this style of games is owned by one of the players, usually the player who formed the game. The group can go at their own pace – no waiting for Sunday’s race if you’re all ready to go on Monday – and the game’s leader can coordinate whether you want to go fast or slow.
The technical implication here is that I need to be able to run the game either on a player’s machine, or on servers. That’s fine, it’ll influence the design but there are ways to achieve this!