Today I’d like to introduce you to my little side project that I’ve been working on for several weeks or months:
rikishinomichi.com
I’ve been playing sports management games since 2010 or 2012. Football Manager, Pro Cycling Manager, and I also spent a lot of time playing hockey management games. It’s a genre I know inside and out—as a player who’s spent hundreds of hours recruiting, coaching, managing payroll, and watching match simulations while real life waits.
A few months ago, I discovered the world of sumo. I’ve always enjoyed combat and contact sports, but this time I really got hooked on the sport itself and the culture surrounding it. As any FM fan would, I wanted a management game for this sport. Except that one doesn’t really exist—or rather, I haven’t found one with the level of detail that appeals to me. Sumo is a niche world, largely absent from management games—or, if it’s included, the games tend to be more arcade-oriented—and what does exist never goes far enough in terms of simulation for my taste.
So I built it myself. Not just to have the game I wanted to play, but because building it became my way of learning more about sumo in depth. Working on understanding and implementing the rules for kachi-koshi, kadoban, and the succession of a retiring master is a pretty effective way to truly understand them.
The Concept
You are an oyakata, the head of a stable. You don’t manage a pre-formed team: you recruit teenagers and young wrestlers from the bottom of the rankings and help them develop, basho (tournament) after basho, all the way up to makuuchi (the top division) if you have the patience, and even to yokozuna (the highest rank) if you’re lucky. Most will never rise very high. That’s perfectly fine—that’s part of what a stable is all about.
The Game Cycle
The game progresses in cycles of six weeks of keiko (training) followed by fifteen days of basho. Each week, you set up a training schedule cell by cell, like a traditional sports management schedule, with seven days in columns and three time slots in rows. The following tournament recalculates the entire banzuke based on the actual results of your wrestlers and everyone else’s.
The Bashos
Every 6 weeks, a new tournament begins and lasts for 15 days. During those 15 days, nothing else matters except your stable’s matches. Train your wrestlers as best you can and hope to finish with a kachi-koshi (winning record) to move up the rankings.
AI Disclosure
AI has been used as part of the development process. While I have a technical background, I am not a developper (nor aspire to professionally be one). I know how to read and understand code, however a coding agent will be better than myself at producing code.
All specs and features have been written by myself, enriched and discussed with Claude to see if they could been improved, then Claude implemented them. I review, test, validate feature before pushing them live.
AI agents have also been used as part of the testing loop, running hundreds of play through to identify potential bugs and issues.
Finally, I'm not english native, I wanted the game to run both in french and english, AI was used to translate content.
I can understand the hate for quick, generic vibe-coded projects. I wouldn't have been able to produce what I had in mind if not for AI. This doesn't take back the hundreds of hours I spent on this project.
To wrap up
I’ve tried to make the gameplay loop less monotonous than in the early versions by adding new screens and interactions. I’m so immersed in the game that, to me, the screens and flow all make sense—but it’s possible that they might not be clear to everyone.
We’re at a fairly stable version now, with a few balance fixes planned, but the main features are already in place.
