Game Features

Most sports games concentrate on simulating actual matches, but many also include a number of management functions as well—the challenges of managing a team or an athlete’s career. A few sports games implement only this aspect of the sport and don’t allow the player to control individual athletes in matches. Occasionally called manager games, these are particularly popular in Europe.

Game Structure

The main gameplay mode in a sports game is match play, simulating the sport itself as it is played. Players can usually pause the game, which normally brings up a menu permitting them to substitute athletes, change the camera view, perform other sorts of coaching tasks, and sometimes adjust the AI. Players can also save the game for later or abandon it.

Outside of match play, most of the game’s modes relate to other aspects of the sport: studying the athletes’ ratings and performance statistics, hiring and trading them, deciding who the starting athletes will be, and following the sport’s match or tournament schedule on a calendar. The screen layouts tend to reflect the bookkeeping nature of these activities, often resembling tables or graphs.

Player Roles

The player’s role is most commonly that of an athlete, but in a team sport, that doesn’t mean just one particular athlete. In a team sport, the player’s focus of control usually follows the action rather than being tied to a single individual. Thus, the player’s role may shift rapidly, especially if some athletes play specialized positions such as catcher or goalie.

Many games also permit the player to act as the coach, again a role found chiefly in team sports. The coach selects the starting athletes for the team, sets offensive and defensive strategies, and makes athlete substitutions during the match. The player usually switches to the coach role during timeouts or other pauses in the action.

Finally, there’s the role of general manager of the team. The general manager hires, fires, and trades athletes, trying to recruit the best athletes within the limitations of the budget. See Figure 1 for an example. In a game that allows it, the manager also tries to build up the team over a period of years, improving its standing in the league.

Figure 1 Madden NFL 25’s athlete trading screen, a management function

Gameplay and Rules

The challenges and actions of a sports game are those of the actual sport but with the actions of the athletes’ bodies mapped onto the control devices of the game machine. Whatever the athletes try to achieve in the match, the player tries to achieve. In the coaching role, the challenges are to choose the most appropriate strategy for the moment from among those offered by the game and to manage the athletes so that they don’t become overtired or injured (assuming the game implements those concepts).

The rules of a sports game are, for the most part, the rules of the sport in the real world. You might find that you need to relax these rules in some areas, particularly with respect to faults, fouls, or judgment errors that the player might make. Because the player is using a handheld device to manipulate an athlete on-screen instead of playing on the field himself, it’s much more difficult to judge when his avatar is about to bump into someone, cross into a forbidden zone, and so on. A few games allow the player to set the level of computerized refereeing to forgiving or strict, depending on which way he likes to play.

You also have to decide if you want to simulate athlete mistakes that are outside the player’s control. For example, in American football, penalties are called for holding, grabbing hold of another athlete instead of merely pushing him. This is an aspect of the sport that a computerized version might have difficulty simulating and could avoid entirely: The game could simply make it impossible for one athlete to hold another. However a match in which no holding penalties ever occurred would feel unrealistic. On the other hand, a match in which the player is randomly penalized for holding when he hasn’t actually done anything wrong might be frustrating for some players. Allowing the player to adjust the refereeing mechanism can solve this problem. Under realistic refereeing, the game would generate penalties at random at about the same rate at which they occur in real matches. Under relaxed refereeing, the game would not generate any penalties except for those actually under the player’s control.

Competition Modes

Unlike most other games, sports games allow all possible modes of competition. Depending on the sport and on how many input devices your platform supports, you can offer single-player, competitive, cooperative, team, and league modes; people love to play sports games competitively. Sports games sell far more copies for console machines than they do for PCs, primarily because console machines allow the play to take place in the living room, which tends to be the center of sports viewing already. They also allow many people to play at once in the same room. Because many real sports feature competition between multiple people or teams, these sports naturally offer opportunities for multiplayer action.

One other competition mode you should consider including is one with no players at all: the computer versus itself. Few other games besides chess games ever implement this mode; after all, people play computer games to interact, not to watch. However, with sports games, people do occasionally like to let the game play itself and watch the results, just as if they were watching a real match on TV. This also allows the computer to play simulated matches that the player doesn’t want to play; see the later section “Simulating Matches Automatically.”

Victory and Loss Conditions

The victory and loss conditions for a match are the same as in the real sport. However, many games that simulate team or league sports offer players a variety of ways of playing the game, usually referred to simply as modes. (Note that these are not the same as competition modes or gameplay modes.)

• Season mode. The player selects a single team (or athlete, for individual sports such as skiing) from all those available and plays a series of matches throughout a season, trying to make it into the championships. The schedule of play for the season and the rules for moving into and up the championship bracket are adopted from the real sport. Some season modes allow a player to play not just one team’s matches but every single match played throughout an entire season.

• Exhibition mode. In this mode, the players play one single match, but it has no long-term consequences, just like exhibition matches (also called friendlies in the UK) played by real teams. Whoever wins the match wins the game.

• Sudden death. As a variant of exhibition mode, players play a match only until the first score is made. Whoever makes the first score wins the game. This is handy for very quick games, although it means that luck plays a much greater role in determining the outcome.

• Round robin. Players in a group each take a team and play each other’s team a fixed number of times, sometimes just once. Whoever has won the most matches at the end is the winner.

• Tournament mode. In a single-elimination tournament, any player who loses any match is dropped, and the winner goes on to play the winner of another match. This requires that the number of players be a power of two. You may organize tournaments in other ways as well.

• Franchise mode, also called dynasty mode. The player controls a team over the course of several seasons, trying to build its strength through the years. This mode often appears in games that include mechanisms for hiring athletes and trading them among teams. For games such as tennis, in which most athletes play alone, the equivalent mode is called career mode—that is, the player controls the athlete over the course of several years of his career.

Opportunities for Creative Play

As sports games are essentially simulations, they offer fewer opportunities for creative play than other genres. However, several do exist:

• Athlete and team creation. You may give the players the opportunity to create teams of their own, either by choosing athletes from the existing database or by entering new athletes with all their attributes. Once the player has a team, you can require that she train the athletes (see Figure 2). This will allow players to create dream teams or famous teams from the past. If you want to prevent them from creating unbeatable teams, you can require that the sum of all the attributes of all the athletes on the team must not go over a certain limit. (Strange though it sounds, once players know they can create unbeatable teams or unbeatable play strategies, they lose some respect for the game.)

Figure 2 The athlete-training screen in MLB 2013: The Show

• Team indicia design. Letting players design their team’s logo and uniform offers them a chance for some creative play that sports games usually lack. Imagine Gymnast, a sports game aimed at young girls, permits the player to design the team’s uniform.

• Strategy design. Players greatly enjoy setting up their own strategies, adjusting how the athletes will behave and what roles they will play in a team sport. You will have to work closely with the programmers, who implement the game’s strategy and AI, to determine what parameters the player can change. One risk of allowing the players to design their own strategy is that they may hit upon some combination that the game AI is completely unable to beat, regardless of the circumstances. Allowing the players to design their own strategies will require the development team to do a lot more testing to prevent this.

• Playing field design. Most sports rigidly define the shape of the field. However, in a few cases (baseball, cricket), the boundaries of the field may be variable. You can allow the player to edit the shape of the playing field or import new playing fields made in other tools.

Miscellaneous Issues

If you want to, you can invent a completely new sport for your game, but this approach is not always a commercial success. Sports games also include two features not usually found in other games: weather and instant replay (the ability to watch an action again in slow motion). This section addresses these issues, which don’t generally apply to other genres.

Invented Sports

From time to time, someone tries to create a sports video game of a completely invented sport as opposed to a simulation of an existing one. Experience shows that this is a risky enterprise. Hardcore sports gamers seldom take an interest in completely new sports; they’d rather play a game that simulates a sport they’re already familiar with. Other types of gamers aren’t particularly interested in sports games anyway, so they aren’t very likely to want to play a one-off sports game unless it appeals to them for some other reason. If you’re thinking of inventing a new sport, you should design it primarily as a video game rather than designing it as an athletic sport for humans to play and then converting it to a video game. This is how Empire Interactive designed Speedball; although theoretically a sport, Speedball includes powerups and other arcade-game elements to make it more interesting to people who don’t normally like sports games.

One of the trickiest aspects of sports game design is mapping real-world activities to a limited input device. Players are willing to tolerate some awkwardness in the user interface (UI) when it’s a real sport because they understand the problems, but with an invented sport, they’re unlikely to be so generous. When designing a completely new sport, you might consider working backward from the controller to the sport itself, designing around the limitations of your hardware.

Weather

Many sports have special rules regarding weather conditions: Rain stops play in baseball but not in football, and so on. The weather can definitely affect the play. Rain and snow make traction difficult, reducing the athletes’ ability to accelerate and lowering the top speed that they can reach. Equipment becomes slippery and more difficult to control when it’s wet. Hot, humid days cause athletes to tire out more easily. Think about how the weather affects the athletes, playing field, and equipment, and adjust your core mechanics appropriately.

Instant Replay

Instant replay is now an essential part of watching sports on television, so naturally video game players want it as well. To implement instant replay, your game will need to keep track of the exact position and animation step of every athlete and all the equipment on the field, or be able to reliably re-create them. The amount of data storage available will limit how much information you can keep around in case the player wants to see it again. When possible, select natural boundaries in the gameplay as the point to begin recording: in baseball, when the ball is pitched; in American football, when the ball is snapped. In continuously flowing games such as basketball, you might need to establish an artificial time limit.

A good many games now show an instant replay automatically after important events, to better re-create the experience of watching the sport on television. Some players find this annoying, however, because it breaks up the flow of the game. All sports games should include instant replay, but players should be able to interrupt the instant replay and to switch off the automatic replay if they want to. Wii Sports provides an automatic instant replay that the player can interrupt by pressing the A button.

The best instant-replay mechanisms allow all the following features for maximum flexibility:

• Play, stop, fast-forward, rewind, and single-frame advance and reverse operations to allow the player to see exactly what happened at every instant.

• The ability to move the camera in all three dimensions to a different position above the field or court, and to pitch the camera up and down and pan left and right. (This assumes you are using a 3D graphics engine. With a 2D engine you should at least allow the player to move the camera around unless the field or court fills the screen.)

• The ability to lock the camera to a given athlete or to the ball in order to follow that athlete or ball wherever it goes. This is usually done by showing a symbol on the ground that represents the camera’s focus of attention. If the symbol is directly under an athlete’s feet when the player stops moving the camera, the camera locks onto that athlete.

Instant replay lets the players see the action from perspectives that they can’t use when actually playing the game. For the game’s publisher and developer, this kind of instant replay is an invaluable tool for grabbing dramatic screen shots or gameplay footage for sales and demonstrations. You should consider it an essential feature of any sports game that you design.