The empty-niche map.
Most sports have nobody.
No sim ships at all, or last release >5 years old. We have first-mover territory: cricket (2.5B fans), volley (800M), handball (60M licensed), MMA, wrestling, hoops, racing, boxing.
Has indie sims (OOTP for baseball, FHM for hockey) but visual polish a decade behind. We compete on presentation + ecosystem.
Soccer (FM dominant) and Football (Madden NFL franchise mode). We ship later in wave 2 with niche-first angles women's leagues, lower-tier divisions.
One backbone.
Fourteen sport-specific match sims.
MadnessCore · 10 systems
- Reputationdaily tick
- Financebudgets · sponsors
- Scoutingglobal network
- Transfer Marketdynamic · negotiations
- Youth Academylong-term talent
- Squad Dynamicschemistry · cliques
- Media Relationspress cycles
- Analyticsform curves
- Board Expectationshire-and-fire
- Player Developmentpeaks · plateaus
Five titles. Five empty markets.
Where we are. Where we're going.
From working build → shipping vision
Hoops shipped its design pass first because it's the most code-mature title (96 files, 41K LOC). The other 13 titles are at various stages on this same path — sim and data first, then UI polish. The 5 pilot titles below all hit the “design target” quality bar by Q4 2026 ship. The 9 stretch titles follow on a rolling cadence as they unlock.
AAA-grade depth · live design pass
Remaining: Calendar · Tactics · Standings · Stats Leaders · Playoffs · Trades · Front Office · Settings.
Q4 2026 SHIP
Eleven of seventeen Hoops screens shipped. Shared CSS shell (10 KB CSS + 6 KB JS) enforces vocabulary across every screen — header / sidebar / 12-col canvas / sport-color tokens. Same pattern ports identically to the 13 other sports adapted from the v02 Hub by swapping accent + sport content. Each pilot title ships its core 17 by Q4 2026.
Same shell. Different sport.
The 10 KB CSS + 6 KB JS shell that ships Hoops ports to Cricket and Rugby in under 5 seconds via ./port_shell.sh <sport> <accent>. Sport accent + sidebar nav + KPI canon + match-day cinema swap automatically. Below are the live hub mockups for CRICKET (W1 reveal) and RUGBY (W5 reveal) — both work-in-progress, both already prove the factory.
9 SPORTS QUEUED
EVERY FRIDAY · 13 WEEKS
All five pilot hubs above are mockup-grade. The painted pitches, courts, octagon, formations, possession bars, and live commentary are HTML/CSS/JS — same shell as Hoops, ported in seconds per sport. They prove the factory: every sport gets the same AAA-grade chrome with sport-specific match-day cinema. Polish lands continuously through pre-launch.
Madden owns the NFL license. We own everything else. Pro · College · High School in one career. Hire-and-fire, recruit, draft, manage cap, trade, win the Bowl. Play-call layer with 8 offensive systems × 6 defensive schemes, scouting graded across 12 measurables. Real depth, no DLC squeeze.
Nobody ships volley management. 800M fans worldwide. Empty market. Indoor 6v6 + beach 2v2 + men's & women's careers from launch. Set distribution per zone, rotation order, libero substitution rules. Italian Serie A, Brazilian Superliga, Polish PlusLiga — defictionalized but recognisable.
2.5 billion fans. Zero serious management sim ships. Test · ODI · T20 · The Hundred · franchise leagues. Ball-by-ball sim with bowling lines, field placements, wagon-wheel analytics. Hindi UI day one. Indian, Australian, English, Pakistani, South African competitions defictionalised.
EA UFC is a fighting game. Nobody ships the promoter sim. You run the org: book cards, build storylines, negotiate fighter contracts, sell PPV, manage 8 weight divisions. Striking · grappling · submissions · cardio modelled per fighter, with title-shot pressure and rivalry escalation.
Both codes shipped together. Union 15v15 and League 13v13 in one game. Premiership, Top 14, URC, Super Rugby — defictionalised. Set-piece tactics: scrum dominance, line-out calls, ruck speed, kick-from-hand strategy. 6 Nations + Rugby Championship + World Cup all bookable in career.
The stretch sports aren't vapor. They're building.
Below: two of the nine stretch sports — Wrestling and Boxing — running in current alpha builds today. The codebases are already shipped (Wrestling 126 files / 29.5K LOC · Boxing 116 files / 31.1K LOC). When the stretch unlocks, design pass and ship — same path Hoops is on.
AAA presentation × deep sim mechanics.
Calendar · Coach Profile · Rotation · Box Score · Live Match · Tactical · Standings.
Scouting · Transfers · Board · Youth · Squad · Media · Career · Save Hub.
Half-court · Field · Oval+pitch · Volley court · Ring+storyline. Five visually distinct match views.
90% safe-zone for Steam Deck + console TV. Mono-aligned digits at every density.
Women's careers, built in.
Day one. No DLC.
One person. Four months.
Fourteen builds.
“Four months ago I couldn't write a line of C++. Today, fourteen sports games build clean on UE 5.7. That's not a brag — that's the point. AI-piloted dev means one person can carry a catalogue. The bottleneck is no longer code. It's taste, scope, and shipping.”
MADNESS exists because the management-sim genre froze. One incumbent owns soccer. Volley, handball, cricket-as-management, MMA-as-promoter — nobody ships them. Half the world's sports have no serious career-mode game. That's not a market gap. That's a market vacancy.
The factory model — one shared MadnessCore plugin + per-sport match adapters — is what makes 14 titles tractable for one builder. Reuse 80% of the engineering, swap the on-pitch action. Every title is a real product, not a reskin: own match sim, own tactics, own ruleset, own database.
Why Kickstarter and not just ship Steam? Because backers vote with stretch goals which sport unlocks next. The campaign is the focus group. The pricing model — €75 Captain bundles all 5 pilots at €15/game vs €25 Steam retail — only makes sense if you're committing to the franchise, not buying a single game.
Cold start
Zero C++. Zero UE. Day-1 Cursor + Claude Code. First commit: Hoops scaffold.
4 builds
Hoops · Gridiron · Cricket · MMA compile clean. MadnessCore shape emerges from duplication.
The factory
MadnessCore extracted as plugin. IMadnessSportAdapter wired across all 14. 10 FM systems shared.
14 / 14
UE 5.7 migration. All 14 codebases build clean. Kickstarter approved Apr 25. Goes live May.
Eleven tiers.
Pick your level of in.
What unlocks as we grow.
The same tree. Nine locales day one.
Stretch goals tree rendered in EN · FR · ES · DE · IT · PT-BR · JA · HI · ZH — same data source, runtime locale switch via URL param. Proves the i18n pipeline is wired end-to-end before the games even ship. Click any thumbnail to see the live interactive tree.
4 MORE BY GOLD
Same tree, same data, nine languages — switched by a single URL parameter. Plus IT, PT-BR, ZH (not shown above). The exact same i18n architecture is now wired inside the game shells — see below. Polish, Russian, Arabic, Korean follow as part of post-€60k stretch unlocks.
The shell speaks every language — at runtime.
Nav labels · header context · CTAs · footer · group headings — all translated. Same shell architecture, same URL param. Below: Hoops Dashboard in 3 languages, Cricket Hub in Hindi, Rugby Hub in French. All rendered live via ?lang=XX on the shell, no rebuild.
SAME ARCHITECTURE · 14 SHELLS TOTAL
Player names, venues, scores, commentary stay in source language — those are data, not UI. The chrome (every label, every button, every status badge) speaks the player's language. Same i18n dict pattern across all 13 sport shells, same URL param, zero rebuild — flick a switch and the GM speaks Hindi.
How the factory actually ships.
Things backers ask first.
What could go wrong.
And how it gets handled.
One person ships everything.
If the founder goes dark for weeks, the project stalls. Mitigation: all 14 codebases live in private Git repos, source-of-truth documented in every project's CLAUDE.md and a global OVERMIND state file. A successor (or contracted hand) can read the code and continue the same systems. No tribal knowledge locked in one head.
14 sports is more than most studios attempt.
If a sport-specific match sim turns out harder than estimated, that title slips. Mitigation: the base goal funds 5 pilot titles only — Gridiron, Volley, Cricket, MMA, Rugby. The other 9 are stretch goals — they unlock only if the audience funds them, one at a time, with their own delivery target. We never overcommit.
An engine update can break a build.
Unreal 5.7 is current; 5.8 is on the horizon. Major version jumps occasionally break C++ APIs. Mitigation: all 14 builds are continuously verified on 5.7. Migration to 5.8 is sport-by-sport with a known regression suite. Past migrations (5.5 → 5.6 → 5.7) shipped clean within a week each — no behavior surprises.
Posters, artbooks, cards have lead times.
Print runs, customs, international shipping all have failure modes. Mitigation: physical rewards live only at the higher tiers (Pro Pack and above). Production locked with a single EU printer (samples reviewed pre-launch). Shipping handled via a fulfillment partner used by other indie studios — quoted per-region in tier descriptions, no surprise charges.
PS5 / Xbox / Switch 2 ports need certification.
Platform certification (TRC/XR) takes time and can require a second submission. Mitigation: console ports are explicitly stretch goals at €240k+ — meaning the audience funds them only after PC ships. We don't promise a console date until cert is in hand. Steam Deck verification (Linux build) is in scope from day one and already passes the technical bar.
If we hit €30k but not €240k, only some sports ship.
Backers who pledged at €250+ see fewer than 14 titles unlock. Mitigation: tier descriptions are explicit — your 14-game digital pack expands as stretch goals unlock; you're never charged extra for sports that didn't fund. Your final game count = whatever stretch level the campaign hits. Lower tiers pick from the unlocked catalogue.
A note on AI-piloted development. Every line of game logic in this catalogue was written by a human (the founder) reviewing and editing AI-generated drafts. AI is the keyboard speed-up, not the decision-maker. Architecture, gameplay, balance, and shipping calls are all human-owned. The 372,301 lines of C++ exist because a human read every one of them — that's why the builds are clean and the systems compose.