Building a Football Manager Game

Building a browser football manager game from scratch. Zero code background. AI agents as my dev team. The journey starts here.

[Building a Football Manager Game @manager5215]

At 37 with zero technical background, I decided to build my own browser-based football management game. No coding experience, no team, no plan. Just a crazy idea and determination to make it happen. Here's how it's going so far 🧵 #indiedev #buildinpublic

[Building a Football Manager Game @manager5215]

Working on one of my favourite parts of Golden Boot: the in-game newspaper.

Right now it’s template-based.

If it works, the plan is to let an LLM write it from the actual events in your save.

Not just stats. A world that talks back.

#GameDev #IndieGame #FootballManager

[Building a Football Manager Game @manager5215]

Small UI polish session for Golden Boot today.

Spent a couple of hours cleaning up a few screens: Market time formatting, unified tabs, better side panel alignment, Finance toggle moved into the header, and past League champions now clickable from History.

Not big, but cleaner.

[Building a Football Manager Game @manager5215]

Slice 9 is closed: the youth academy is now in.

This was one of those systems that looked small on paper, then became half game design, half spreadsheet therapy.

Young players can now arrive with development tendencies, not just random numbers.

#buildinpublic #indiedev

[Building a Football Manager Game @manager5215]

@AlexFinn Hermes is turning GoldenBoot (the game im building) from ‘solo guy building a football manager game’ into something closer to a tiny AI studio.

Memory for decisions, subagents for code, X drafts, etc

The meta-game: can I manage the agents better than I manage my team?

[Building a Football Manager Game @manager5215]

Thought Slice 8 was done. It was not.

The more I test training, the more edge cases appear: if an older player is declining, should custom training slow the drop in the areas the manager focuses on?

Tiny questions like this are where the game starts feeling deep.
#indiedev

[Building a Football Manager Game @manager5215]

Building a browser football manager where training matters, but doesn’t turn every wonderkid into Messi.

Slice 8: weekly training, aging, retirements, potential-based growth, and a Training Ground that boosts talent without replacing it.

568 tests green.
#indiedev #gamedev

[Building a Football Manager Game @manager5215]

Closed slice 6 of 16 for Golden Boot.

The beta roadmap is starting to look less like a scary wall and more like a weirdly organized staircase.

Next: facilities, construction jobs, upgrades/degrades, and bonuses that actually affect the engine.

~37% there. #indiedev

[Building a Football Manager Game @manager5215]

Sometimes working with AI is exhausting.

I've been at it for 4 hours nonstop today, constantly iterating, and somehow it feels like I haven't moved an inch.

Still not getting the result I want.

Not every build-in-public day is a nice progress update.

#buildinpublic

[Building a Football Manager Game @manager5215]

First slice is done: I can register, create my club, see my real squad, see my league with bots, and open a match preview with my actual screens.

Still far from a full game.

But for the first time, it feels like a game.

#indiedev #ClaudeAI #AItools

[Building a Football Manager Game @manager5215]

I’m building Golden Boot, a browser football manager inspired by the games I used to love playing online.

I’m not a developer. I’m a gamer.

For months I designed the screens, the flows, the buttons, the hovers, the popups…

And I also knew how I wanted the game to work.

[Building a Football Manager Game @manager5215]

So now we’re building with vertical slices.

One slice = one part of the game working from front to back.

Not fake UI forever.
Not backend cave for months.
Just seeing the game become more real step by step.

[Building a Football Manager Game @manager5215]

Golden Boot is moving into a new phase.

Most of the game UI is done — only landing and onboarding left.

Next up: the training engine.

The hard part is making it all balanced: progress has to feel real, but not automatic.

#indiedev #buildinpublic

[Building a Football Manager Game @manager5215]

My 5yo daughter saw a seal eat a penguin in a documentary and is crying like the world has ended.

Current policy: all seals must die.

I’m explaining ecosystems while fighting with Golden Boot’s match narration. Not easy.

#DadLife #VibeCoding #PenguinJustice

[Building a Football Manager Game @manager5215]

Just dropped Claude Max 20x → 5x (00→00/mo) and moved ChatGPT Plus → Pro.

Installed Hermes and Discord + agents work again.

After Anthropic OAuth broke OpenClaw, I’d been stuck in Claude Code CLI.

Feels like early OpenClaw: fast and weirdly smart.

#buildinpublic #AIagents

[Building a Football Manager Game @manager5215]

Listening to hours of Spanish football radio commentary.
Building a football manager where matches are text-narrated like a real broadcast. Mined 138K words from real games (COPE, SER, LALIGA) so the templates don't sound like Google Translate or robotic. This is football.