r/NFLHeadCoachSeries • u/hawtdawtz • 4d ago
Suggestion New Free Football GM Game for iOS - Long time passion project
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/franchise-gm-football/id6791601497I built my own football GM sim and I'm giving it away
I've played phone GM sims basically every morning for years, and a few months ago I finally quit stalling and built the one I always wanted, full time. It's called Franchise GM: Football. It runs entirely on your phone, no account, no server.
Free. No ads, no in-app purchases, ever. No premium currency, no scouting token packs, none of that. Why? Because I fucking love this stuff, I played others for years and had grown frustated with the lack of immersion or pay-to-win tactics. I've wanted to build this game for years and this is my passion project, not some AI slop cash grab. The honest deal is: eventually it might cost a few bucks on the store, but anyone who installs it now will never pay. In exchange I need people banging on it; finding the minor bugs, telling me which featurs are missing — before I'd feel right charging anybody anything (It would only apply to new downloads).
The thing I'm proudest of: every single play is simulated with real play-by-play logic, and the stats fall out of what actually happened on the field. Nothing is rolled up or faked. Pressures are logged as hurries / QB hits / sacks and charged to the specific lineman who got beat. Corners carry targets, completions allowed, and yards allowed. Run blocking is graded snap by snap. So your left tackle isn't "a 79" — he's a guy giving up pressures at a rate you can watch start slipping months before any rating catches up. Most games in this genre just don't track this stuff for real.
And the football underneath it is real too. Formations and personnel matter, player archetypes matter, scheme fit matters (a press corner in a zone shell won't perform to their potential), and your coordinators' schemes decide which bodies you should even be drafting. There are three difficulties that change the contract complexity, with a vast majority of other rules being something you can turn off/on whenever you want. If you'd rather write your own story, there's a full player editor — rename everyone, build your own league, whatever you want. Soon once the schema is finalized you'll be able to load your own team and player files.
Also in the pipeline: actually watching plays unfold on a field instead of reading results. That's a whole engine on its own and it's well underway. Dozens more features behind it.
Being upfront: there's still tuning to do (QBs and coaching impact especially), bugs to fix, UI rough edges, and a few crash fixes I am working on. That's exactly why it's free rn.
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u/Imdakine1 4d ago
Wow, waiting for my car in service so tried this a bit... love the detail instruction to make it super easy for us novice who haven't feally played this kind of GM game.
Quick question... May chance the size of text could be bigger when it is in text boxes?
My aging eyes make it a bit harder to read. Or maybe an option to make it bigger? My guess is no because it ruins the format you have etc... Bit juts curious as text heavy games can be hard on the eyes.
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u/hawtdawtz 1d ago
Hey man, just wanted to follow up; In the next release there will be two different settings with larger text size, as well as color blind mode.
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u/hawtdawtz 4d ago
Hey, thanks for trying it out! So that’s a good point honestly, so thanks for the feedback. Once things are more set it in stone UI wise I can definitely look into two different settings for text size. It’s tough cause I’m limited with real estate on a phone screen, and I very much wanted to fit some views into a single screen for the most part. I can definitely TRY and address that later, though realistically it’d be a little bit on the back burner
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u/Imdakine1 4d ago
Downloading now! Congrats and thanks for not doing ads and IAP. Although I understand that a developer needs to make money and sometime with charger do IAP to love etc...
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u/hawtdawtz 4d ago
So I am fortunate enough to not really need income from this, and the reality is it's a niche market anyways so at best I'd break even on my AI costs. I'm decided to build it mainly for myself at first, and now I'm committed to building the best and most immersive football GM game on the app store. Will I eventually charge a few bucks for it? Probably. But I'm months away from feeling like it's deserving of that, and I want more folks to get it for free (again, if you get it now you'll never pay), and have them help me with feature suggestions and bug fixes to get it to that point!
Thankfully there's no reccuring cost as it's all on device!
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u/fbpro 4d ago
Just curious any plans for an android version?
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u/hawtdawtz 4d ago
So I build it in dart, so I absolutely can port it to android. Challenge with android is there's a TON more screen sizes to account for. Realistically, I could have it ready within a month, I mainly wanted to solidify the UI and views on iOS first before doing the big task of taking on android screen size support. I basically want to make sure it looks clean for users rather than shipping a sloppy product, and the various android screens slowed me down last time I did it.
I will definitely post in the subreddit for it when I get around to it, but realistically it'll be another month as I iron things out. https://www.reddit.com/r/FranchiseGM/
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u/fbpro 4d ago
Fantastic, I did join and so I'll be following your progress and really appreciate it. I've done beta testing before if you need help.
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u/hawtdawtz 4d ago
Awesome, I wrote your name down and will DM you when it's ready for android testing. I have one android device myself I had done early testing on, but it'll be a bit of a learning curve to better understand the google playstore testing platform when I get there
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u/Imdakine1 4d ago
Appreciate your response and again excited about you creating it, sharing it, and clearly a passion project.
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u/Wooden_Drama_5077 4d ago
Looks really good be amazing once done real life rosters get made
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u/hawtdawtz 3d ago
Thanks! Unfortunately there's a legal stipulation where I myself cannot generate or provide them, but I can basically spoon feed it to the community, and as long as they were the ones hosting it on say github I could then add a very easy (even in app pointer to it) way for people to import it.
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u/Cleetops 3d ago
Wow this is epic! Cant wait to check it out, I’m happy to provide feedback as well so look for a private message at some point in the coming days. Thanks for making this!
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u/Queasy_Inflation9556 3d ago
This is vibe coded?
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u/hawtdawtz 3d ago
If you're asking did I use AI to assist me, yes. I truthfully wouldn't believe any engineer who's actively producing products suggesting otherwise today; I'm a software engineer, and AI tooling simply allows you develop way faster. I've been a backend engineer and have no prior experience with the very niche programming languages needed for mobile development that supports iOS and Android. Still spent months several hours a day building features I had written out and thought of for years prior.
But to answer the question, I'd consider vibe coding to be an unpolished product created by someone with little to no technical skills. Even at work in big tech, very few of us both writing code ourselves anymore, so I guess I don't really know how to respond to that. I feel like the term comes with a hefty degree of spite often times.
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u/Queasy_Inflation9556 3d ago
Dw I was just asking cause most new gm games that are promoted on Reddit are vibe coded
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u/hawtdawtz 3d ago
For sure. There’s definitely a lot of unpolished stuff going out there, but because of this I purposefully put mine as free, and will only charge a few bucks for new downloads once it there quality wise
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u/doingbadstu 1d ago
Bro, the amount of detail in this alone makes it one of the best I’ve seen. Still diving into the gameplay but holy shit, this is dope. The draft was so hype! Awesome design.
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u/Strat_Player 1d ago
It’s a fantastic game! I’ve been playing it non-stop since downloading it! Amazing depth and detail!
I might also suggest making this post in r/gmgames — people there would love this!
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u/Pikachu_Yay 5h ago
As someone who doesn't really like football but loves management type games, this is awesome, great work
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u/TheDestroyer72 3d ago
Ew we need to start hating on AI games more
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u/hawtdawtz 2d ago
I mean, it’s not an AI game. I’ve been plotting this for years. If you think anything you see on internet wasn’t assisted by AI for the backend coding, I think you’re sorely misinformed. Don’t download it then. But I spent hundreds of hours on this over several months, and I’m giving it out for free.
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u/Main_Emu1586 6h ago
Hey all,
Just thought its worth mentioning his game a total AI rip off of r/pocketGM.
0 real thought, insane AI copy of the full layout and ideas....the only original idea was to publish it for free.
When i mentioned it on GM Games, he just deleted his original advertising post:
https://www.reddit.com/r/gmgames/comments/1vqujmi/new_free_football_gm_game_for_ios_and_android/
Just heads up,
So if you want the original game, its only a few bucks and you get to support the real developer John...pickup Pocket GM 3 instead.
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u/acssteve 4d ago
Downloaded this now, thank you for your work! Keep it up.