FOOTDRAFT (38-0-20)

FOOTDRAFT is a head-to-head football-manager game built on Metaplay: spin-draft eleven legends into a formation, then take on your friends in a 20-team, 38-matchday season league — one matchday simulated per day, a transfer market between matchdays, and a full live-service meta around it (wallet economy, daily and season quests, season pass, ranked ladder, LiveOps events, in-game inbox).

It is an online, scalable reimagining of the viral single-player "38-0" concept — can your XI go a whole season unbeaten? — and it was built almost entirely with the Metaplay Agent over a couple of days of background prompting. The client is a Blazor WebAssembly web app, so the whole game runs in the browser.

Key Takeaways

FOOTDRAFT shows how Metaplay's architecture carries a multiplayer live-service game that was largely written by an AI agent:

• Deterministic client-server model — the same PlayerModel and PlayerAction code runs on both client and server. Actions execute optimistically on the client for responsiveness while the server validates everything, so the economy is cheat-proof by construction.
• Charge-in-action economy pattern — transfer fees and gem spends are charged inside client-predicted actions (deterministic, validated server-side), with server-issued refund actions if a cross-entity operation is rejected. See PlayerLeagueTransferSwap in SharedCode/Player/PlayerActions.cs.
• A server-authoritative league singleton — the 20-team season league (turn-based shared-pool draft, daily matchday sims, transfer market) lives in a persisted LeagueActor that survives restarts and redeploys (Backend/Server/League/).
• Sheet-backed game configs — legends, formations, league rules and quests compile from a Google Sheet into type-safe classes both client and server consume. Designers rebalance the game from the LiveOps Dashboard with no deploy.
• LiveOps events, mail and a custom dashboard — Coin Rush multiplier events, reward mail, and custom "Season Leagues" admin pages on the Metaplay LiveOps Dashboard.
• A web client without Unity — WebClientBase/ is a small generic Blazor WASM framework over the Metaplay client SDK; WebClient/ is the game UI on top of it.

How to Explore

• Open the game config sheet to see how the content is authored: Footdraft Game Config (view-only).
• Read the code: start from SharedCode/Player/PlayerModel.cs (player state), SharedCode/Player/PlayerActions.cs (every mutation in the game), and Backend/Server/League/LeagueActor.cs (the season league).
• Run it locally (below) and open the LiveOps Dashboard at localhost:5550.

Setup Instructions

1. Clone the repository
2. Install the Metaplay CLI
3. Initialize the Metaplay SDK with python3 init-sdk.py
4. Run the server with metaplay dev server
5. Run the web client with dotnet run --project WebClient/WebClient.csproj -p:MetaplayWebAssembly=true and open localhost:5290

Note: this project was built with an internal preview of Metaplay SDK Release 38, which ships publicly soon — until then init-sdk.py can't fetch it, so treat this repo as a peek behind the curtain at what the source of a Metaplay live-service game looks like. Once R38 lands, clone and run.

Unit tests: dotnet test Backend/SharedCode.Tests. End-to-end tests (Playwright, needs the server and client running): dotnet test WebClient.Tests. After changing [MetaSerializable] types, regenerate the WASM serializer: dotnet run --project tools/SerializerGen -- WebClient/Serializer.

License

The code in this repository is licensed under Apache-2.0. The bundled player dataset (real footballer names, clubs and seasons in SharedCode/Draft/SeasonSquadsGenerated.cs and the game config sheet) and other assets are included for demonstration purposes only and are not covered by the open-source license — they may not be redistributed or used commercially.