A Progress Report

If you've been reading this blog since July, you may recall me mentioning an ambitious project involving U SPORTS women's hockey, EA Sports' NHL '94 game, and my ability to learn hexadecimal while preserving the sanctity of the game. I wrote a quick piece on the idea of turning an NHL '94 game into a playable U SPORTS women's hockey game with teams and players from the current era. That piece was written on July 29, so you may be asking what I've been doing since posting that idea, and I can assure you that today's progress report may have some of you smiling.

As reported back on July 29, I managed to get all the schools, team names, and arenas they play in entered into the grid-like screen used in the ROM editor. There is limited amounts of room one can use to enter this information thanks to the original EEPROM sizes in Sega Genesis cartridges, but it happened. All of the teams seen below still exist on my version of UWHKY '94. Note that the working title will likely not be the final title for the game.

Again, I'll restate the following about the teams shown above: "I had to make some decisions that were based on history of winning, appearances at Nationals, and university recognition. I will also admit to there being some bias towards the nine Canada West teams that appear, so that's on me. You can be unhappy about that, but the vast majority of the teams in the list above have played often at Nationals, won Nationals, or medalled at Nationals." This statement still holds true, so don't expect many changes there.

I also noted in the July 29 article that "all fifth-year players and all red-shirted players will be excluded", and that's remained true in some cases but I've had to re-examine my stance on this. Because I want this game to be current for 2023-24, I've decided that 2023-24 rosters will be used for all teams. As it stands, not every team has their updated 2023-24 rosters on their websites yet, so I'm filling out the rosters with last season's information. As a result, not every team has been updated to reflect a current roster, and this is why I haven't rushed to complete the work on the game yet.

No one wants to hear what I haven't done, though, so let's get to what has been completed so we can see how much work still needs to be done before we get to serious women's hockey gaming!

First, all team rosters have been entered alphabetically up to and including the StFX X-Women, leaving nine teams and the two "all-star teams" needing to be completed. That means those eleven teams need player names entered, player ratings adjusted to reflect a player's abilities, uniform and sprite updates to reflect team colours, and a quick verification to make sure no one was missed from the roster. In saying that, I can complete one team in about an hour, so that leaves about 11 hours worth of work to complete before the teams are entered and finalized.

Once October hits, I'll go through all the teams once again just to ensure that rosters are as close to accurate as possible based on what is published on each team's website, and that will finalize the most difficult part of this process since this is mostly data entry. In total, let's say that I'm about 20 hours from being done with team information for argument's sake.

Here's the fun part, though: I've tested the game with a few teams already! In the screenshot below, you can see Mount Royal Cougars forward Athena Hauck converted an Aliya Jomha feed when she beat Alberta Pandas netminder Halle Oswald! How cool is that?

I still need to insert logos at center ice for each team, update the logos on the main team select screen, update the banners used on the game start screen, update the player photos, update Ron Barr and his speech in the pregame setup, and possibly update the title screen with a more women's hockey-appropriate image. If I'm being totally honest, the player photos are the lowest priority out of all of those "to-do" items, but we'll see how much time it takes for me to complete the other stuff. If there's enough time, I'll look into plugging in player photos. Total time to complete: who knows?

My goal is to have this completed by December. As you know, U SPORTS hockey goes on break for part of December with students writing exams and getting a holiday break from school, so there's no better time to have everyone playing this game as their favorite team and players. Based on that timeframe, it also gives me a chance to watch a handful of games from each conference to ensure that player ratings are accurate. Or as close to accurate as possible. If you have a bad game, you better hope I don't see it (KIDDING!).

Briefly, there's still a lot of work to do, but I'd say I'm nearing being halfway to done with the teams almost done. The center ice and main screen logo changes are just rinse-and-repeat processes once I get that mastered, so we'll see how the next pieces of completing this game go. What needs to be stressed, though, is that the testing works for gameplay with names and rosters, and that delights me to no end as I figured that would be the most difficult part!

I'll have more progress reports here on HBIC as I hit benchmarks in the creation of this game. The biggest part of the game's creation - team and roster info - is almost done, though, so we're getting closer. After that, it will be time to unleash U SPORTS women's hockey on the world where everyone can enjoy it!

Until next time, keep your sticks on the ice!