March is just around the corner and everyone knows what that means. It's almost tournament time, baby! It also means it is time for another season of Draft Day Sports: College Basketball and we've got some exciting new changes to bring to you this year. As mentioned on our Twitch stream the changes really fall into four different categories - bigger new additions, behind the scenes improvements, new looks and what we call quality of gameplay improvements - things that just make life a little easier while playing. Let's take a look into these categories.

As you can see, things look different as we have adapted the game to the dark UI that we brought about in our other games this year. This really makes the game pop and makes it easier to look at for long periods of time as well. We know some of you have those marathon gaming sessions late into the night because you need just one more season and with the new dark UI it should make those late night gaming sessions easier to take on.

There have been a lot of changes that fall into the behind the scenes category with one of the big ones being change in the bracketing logic. We have worked hard to improve the bracketing of teams for the championship tournament including rearranging the overall seeds of the teams so that the top two teams are always on opposite sides of the bracket ensuring that they would meet in the finals instead of the semifinals if the brackets held. Here's some of the other items you won't necessarily see on screen but are important improvements.

• A 358th team added to the database and new 14 team, 2 conference setup to match real world settings
• Adjustments to impact of home court advantage as well as visiting team performance to ensure that overall impact of those items is closer to real world results
• Adjustments to game engine code in areas of fatigue, defensive intensity, press impact and steals to more accurately reflect the impact that an aggressive defense would have on the team running it and more accurately credit the players who should be getting steals
• Adjustments have been made to tutoring impact so that players are not as easily able to recover their poor grades to become eligible again
• Changes made to LOI signing periods so that players who do not initially sign early might still sign later on or even possibly change their mind and commit to another team as opposed to simply being players who may not attain the necessary SAT score to sign with your school.

Of course there are some big time changes to the game as well - the biggest being the all new transfer portal option. This is going to drastically change how you play and add yet another strategy path in the game to build your school up. Now, if this feature isn't good news for you let me assure you there is an option to turn it off and continue on with the old transfer rules if you prefer that style of play.

But for everyone else, buckle up as the new transfer portal system almost brings a free agency type feel to the game. Not only will far more players look to transfer each season but they will be able to be eligible to play immediately (one time - the game is set to mimic real world rules where a player can do this once in his career). With hundreds and hundreds of players in the transfer portal you will have an opportunity to drastically reshape your team..that is if you have the scholarships open to do it. This opens up a new strategy path as you decide whether or not to use all your scholarships on high school recruits or maybe keep one or two open for transfers who could slide in and give an immediate boost to your program. Of course this means your players will be more open to transferring to so you may end up with a few scholarships from players you lose as well. All in all it shapes up to be one of the most exciting developments in recent history of the game and a significant amount of development time has gone into it.

We've also heard your requests for even more customization options and we have delivered for you this season. New options now exist to do things like give specific names to stages of the championship tournament, set how many years specifically players must play before leaving for the pros and the frequency with which players will declare. Here's a few more new items

• New praise option added when talking to players to try and build your relationship instead of having only negative options
• Player cards now have an icon to link directly to the box score from the game log
• New comparison screen allows you to compare two players directly on the screen
• Game flow chart available from the box score screen to give you an idea of how the game played out better
• New feature which allows your assistant coaches to make recommendations to you as part of the coaching staff screen

In addition to all of those things there are of course a myriad of things that have been added just to make the game play experience better. In the screen above you can see that the play by play label is now color coded to the appropriate team and below the energy bars you get a specific percentage listed to help you better determine just how tired the player is rather than relying only on the color or length of the bar. Some other types of improvements like this include

• For those of you who like to link your CB league with a league in Draft Day Sports: Pro Basketball we've added in-game popups that will prompt you when it is time to perform actions so that you don't always have to run to the help option in the game for the instruction list.
• New quick start option lets you set up a default league in seconds
• NET ranking displayed on daily schedule screen with W/L record
• Emails received in game to confirm your report and summer travel plans (or see what the AI did for you if the AI is controlling it)
• Ability to automatically change the strategy and practice settings on a new team to match what you had at your old team when changing jobs

Those are just some of the new things in the game this year - in fact that last one came as a direct suggestion of someone who attended our Developer Dynasty stream on Twitch. We love feedback and ideas from the community and often times they drive the new features or improvements in the game. We hope you are as excited for this year's version as we are and we look forward to see how you #BuildYourDynasty as you head on the road to tournament glory! Head to our webstore now to pick up your copy!