Ultimate Game Design : Building game worlds

C H A P T E R 5
signs altogether. Simply put, you want plenty of condensed action points if you are
trying to appeal to the action player. This is why it’s so important to keep in mind
your “target player” when making design decisions. You make decision trade-offs
based on your intended audience.
The fantasy aspect of the sports experience flies in the face of sports simulation. A
purist baseball simulation might have you spending nine years playing AA/AAA ball!
Players want to proceed quickly, get better at both offense and defense quickly, and
challenge the pros by lunch. This is part of the pleasure in the experience. If players
are stifled by an extended or cumbersome route, with bad physical play controls, you
will lose your audience.
Licensing, the ability to use known professional teams, players, and stadiums or
venues, will affect the “reach” of your design. In the recent past, you could make
sports games without a major sports league franchise license from, for example, Major
League Baseball (MLB) or the National Basketball Association (NBA). Technically,
you still can, but most game players prefer the game that has access to and
utilizes the familiar talent of the sport they prefer. Again, part of the fantasy is putting
yourself in control of the teams and athletes.
Sports games require heavy tuning. Tuning refers to editing into perfection moves,
functions, or data until an action or event “performs” properly in the game. Animation
transitions from move to move are complex, yet must perform seamlessly.
Sports games usually require editing minutiae like ball scale (the size of the ball at different
performance points), passing zones (when does the ball transfer ownership
from player to player?), and catch zones (how big is the zone for catching or dropping
the ball?), among many other detail-specific functions.
Most sports titles include a player versus CPU mode, so the computer has to be
programmed to compete against human players in offensive and defensive actions.
These require complex scripts and programming. Here’s a quick example. If you
have two defenders and a goalie guarding a hockey goal, with two wingers and a center
coming at the goal on offense in some unique formation, how does the computer
best position the defenders? It’s hard to program a player’s intuition.
This is why sports games build rules into their scripts … rules that can be discovered
and exploited easily by human players! The rules in defense or offense scripts
generally take up a straight conditional form (for example, if the puck is in this quadrant
or area on the ice, with this number of players involved, then set up the defense
like this, and modify it slightly in this way based on opposing player orientation).
Another challenge for sports game designers is getting the player and arena look
and feel correct. People spend hours staring at these players and locations. They
know what they look like. You want these to be pleasing to your audience, and you
have to present the players and arenas in the best possible light to your licensor (the
party giving you permission to use known players and arenas). This often requires
plenty of work and revision to get player models, textures, and facial detail correct.
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Design by Genre