Hello, ballers!

Hope you have enjoyed the time off and spent the Christmas period with family and friends in a great atmosphere. We are getting closer to the end of the year, which means we are also getting closer to celebrating the New Year's Eve and that it's time to fill you in on the progress of our work and share some numbers with yourselves. Of course, as always we would like to wholeheartedly thank you for the patience, feedback and faith you have put in us so far. We promise, we are not going to disappoint you. This devlog will be split up into following parts: achievements, objectives, obstacles and statistics. Without further ado, let's get to it.

Achievements

As foolish as it may sound, we genuinely believe we have achieved a few objectives this year and are on track to tick the other ones off in 2022. First of all, we have successfully launched our website, Discord and gathered quite a community. From end-users perspective these may not seem important or significant but making the little steps enabled us to collect vital feedback, further brainstorm our ideas and change some of the in-game systems to make them more exciting to you, and last but not least these mini-goals gave us the opportunity to build a relationship with the whole community. It is something we will always be highlighting because we make our projects for people, without you there would really be no point to push the development forward.

Further, we have managed to organise mini-events on Discord and our social media, which brought the community together for quite a while. Seeing you guys participate in the pick-em challenge and discus your picks, as well as, what was going on during the games was truly incredible. We have also completed a lot of technical objectives, although we are not where we thought we would be at this time, we still believe we have put a lof effort into the project and did our best with the tools and resources we've had. Here is a list of the most notable goals we have achieved to this day:

• The UI/UX work has been fully completed
• Coded a good number of the UI design
• Performed internal tests for every system/screen currently programmed
• Fully finished internal documentation used by developers
• Designed and tested the base structure of match engine
• Produced a solid foundation for the commentary system

Objectives

Although comparably short to other parts of the devlog, this might be the most important one for some of you. It focuses on what we would like to accomplish in the upcoming year, so there will be some promises made and hopefully they will provide you something to look forward to in 2022. Below is the list of said goals:

• Alpha stage goes live; we gather any relevant feedback and if need to, we fix broken parts of the code that are affecting in-game systems or general functionality of the app
• We prepare and launch beta test; this phase is planned to be open to the public, so anyone will be able to download the app and sign up. It will allow us to monitor traffic, see how our servers perform, and yet again review all the systems and functionality within the app
• Official premiere of the fballers app; we aim to bring the experience of our football game to all devices running on: Android 9 and above, iOS 12 and above. We are trying our best to support older operating systems, however we cannot guarantee anything at this stage
• Planning first major update; this part will be based on the feedback gathered during alpha and beta tests, as well as any suggestions made on Discord throughout the next few months

Obstacles

This section is nothing but a much needed explanation from our side as to why we haven't released beta or even alpha this year. We appreciate you may not want to listen to excuses and that's totally fine, but recommend you to not skip this paragraph nonetheless. If you were expecting for us to launch at least alpha this year and you feel somewhat disappointed - trust me, you are not the only one - we completely understand that, since we initially expected to be past the alpha stage or perhaps even in beta at this time of the year. However, creating a, hopefully, huge project would not be fun without any serious obstacles on the way, right?

The one thing that significantly slowed us the most were health issues of one of our staff members, which started around June/July and are unfortunately still on-going. There were times when we didn't even touch the app for a week or two because it was just physically impossible for us. Now, we are hoping that the most threatening issues are behind us, we can spend more time working on the app and remain on course. Although, we feel like this will help you to understand and justify why we don't want to disclose any dates (i.e. official launch), because with a team of our size, the moment one of us gets sick or encounters personal issues, the development comes to a stop.

Statistics

We ought to share some numbers with you that will help us to reflect the progress we have made in 2021, the stats below are not only related to the development but also our fantastic community. As expected, we have made serious advancements in all areas of our project including the promotion of our Discord and social media, although we haven't started our marketing campaign yet. Here are the most vital numbers to this date:

• The number of UI screens within the app currently stands at 182
• Our developers have written over 70 000 lines of code
• Web traffic on our website came from over 10 different countries and we've had over 10 000 unique entries
• We have accumulated 250 likes on our social media pages and over 850 Discord members
• Over 350 users have been on Discord with us for over 6 months so most likely from the beginning, huge thank you for your loyalty and patience
• We have been getting close to 500 visitors and over 2,000 messages sent every month in our Discord

As you can see, the last few months we have been continuously working on the project were not for nothing. Please stay tuned and enjoy yourselves tonight.

Happy New Year, team fballers