A Feasible Approach To Team Sports Games Development
I have been developing team sport games simulators for about eight years now, for two commercial games that I designed and for two consulting jobs (the latter under NDAs). Four projects but a few more prototypes, because for example for the latest game, Roller Drama, I developed several prototypes that I then discarded, not because they were not working, but because they did not generate a gameplay experience that in some form resembled that of the reference sport, Roller Derby. I tried a purely turn-based approach, but the most intriguing dimension of this sport, it’s dynamic, got completely lost, and given that its rules are known to very few, a player would get lost in them. Then I tried a purely real-time version, and again, the combination of many rules and having to follow the brawling simultaneous interactions of ten players made the game mechanic inscrutable to the players. So I ended up making a mix of real-time and turn-based action, and with hundreds of little tuning and fixes, we got to the current gameplay.
Same for the previous one, Football Drama: I tried a full simulation, then a strategic approach, and ended with a turn-based mechanic with a very simple “push or control” player input model, which also took into account the reference mobile player and their affordances.
Creating game prototypes can be extremely costly, and this is very true also for sports games. In this video I try to show how I tried to deal with this problem as a single coder with limited time and resources.
The video’s sections are:
- Understanding what the problem is
- Modeling team sport’s complexity
- Reducing combinatorial complexity
- Make it run
- Before and after the basics
- Making it pretty
Some of the material referenced in the video:
