Interview: Dynamo Games on the challenges of taking Championship Manager mobile

We bloody love Championship Manager 2007, we do. The proof's in our review. A huge stat-heavy football management simulation shouldn't work well on a mobile phone, but the fact that it does is an enormous credit to developer Dynamo Games, and the producers at Eidos Mobile.

So, what went into the latest mobile version of Champ Man? We grabbed Dynamo's Brian McNicoll to find out, starting with the challenges of boiling down the PC game into something that worked well on mobile.

"Having been huge fans of the PC series, when it came to designing the mobile version we wanted to make sure that it would retain all of the key features that made the title what it is," McNicoll says. "At the same time, we realised that mobile phones are much more limited in terms of memory, resources, screen size and processing power, so certain features would have to be sacrificed."

Such as? Well, offering just one league to play in – the English Premier League – meant Dynamo could include extras like the European Cup, FA Cup, League Cup and promotion/relegation, with smaller teams coming up every year. If the developer had squeezed multiple leagues in, there wouldn't have been enough memory left for these extras.

McNicoll also says that getting over 2,000 players into the mobile game's database required some sharp thinking. "This was one of the features we felt had to be facilitated, as Championship Manager on PC is renowned for having such an extensive player database, and we wanted to get all the main stars from around the world in the game," he says.

"To achieve this we had to cut down the information stored for each player from over 50 attributes down to nine. This seems to work well on mobile, however, as there is still a wide enough range of attributes to determine whether a player will be good in a certain position on the field."

Also dropped was the PC game's 2D match engine, in favour of radio-style text commentary that harked back to the franchise's very first versions. McNicoll thinks that it lets players imagine what's unfolding on the pitch and so doesn't spoil the enjoyment.

Arguably one of the biggest challenges in making a Championship Manager mobile game is working out which audience to target. Do you try to attract existing fans of the PC games and risk them moaning about the cut-down aspects, or do you focus instead on appealing to mobile-owning football fans who've not necessarily played a full simulation on their PC?

As you might expect, the answer is both, with an emphasis on ensuring newbies to the series won't be left floundering.

"We had to make sure that the features in the game weren't too hard to find and pick up," reasons McNicoll. "Therefore we made sure that there was nothing in the game that you would need prior CM-playing experience in order to get working properly or understand what to do with."

Dynamo therefore carried out extensive beta tests with both types of users while developing the game, to make sure everyone was able to pick up and play the final version without getting either grumpy or confused. We think they nailed it.

So what's next? Or, rather than get Dynamo into trouble for talking about future Championship Manager games, how could football management sims evolve on mobile in the future, more generally? One key evolution, believes McNicoll, will be better and more powerful handsets.

"With phones constantly improving and becoming more standardised, we are now able to fit more and more into the game than we ever have before," he says. "This will mean new features such as a 2D match engine, multiple leagues, more and more players, sound, and even more detail."

But even more exciting – albeit ambitious – is the idea of launching a connected mobile football management sim. You know, pitting your team against real mobile users, rather than AI managers. It could happen, according to McNicoll.

"The unique things about the mobile platform are that it is constantly connected to a network, and that people have their phones on them at all times. It's also the biggest gaming platform in the world by far," he says.

So what could this enable?

"For example, you could have a connected manager game where you will constantly be involved in your game, receiving text messages and the like on your phone from other in-game managers, with requests to buying your players and so on," he offers.

"I can see it becoming much more in-tune with the actual football season, in that you play games at certain times during your week and you have a certain amount of time to deal with events, just like a real-life manager."

Cor. And indeed crumbs. If Dynamo or anyone else ever makes such a game, Pocket Gamer might have to shut down – we'd be playing it too much to get any work done. That said, it's not as if multiplayer is going to kill off solo sims.

"All of these things would bring a new level of excitement but there will always be a space for the standalone game where you can spend a whole day of playing, going through season after season in a small space of time," McNicoll says, reassuringly.

"This is where a lot of the enjoyment comes from for a lot of the fans. These two types of management games are distinctly different and bridging that gap is what is the hard thing to achieve."

Somehow, we don't doubt Dynamo's ability to do so.