Summary

A good sports game design requires thoughtful compromises. We do not yet have the computing power to simulate a real sport in all of its complexity and detail on a home computer or video game console—and even if we did, we still don’t have input and output devices that allow a player to feel as if he’s really down on the field. Someday, when we perfect virtual reality and make home computers as powerful as today’s supercomputers, we might be able to do this. In the meantime, it’s the job of the sports game designer to fit the sport to the machine. Sports game design is a subtle process that entails endless tuning and tweaking to find the right balance between realism and playability. When you get it right, you have a product that can sell for years and years.

Design Practice Case Study

Choose a sports game that you believe, from your own experience of playing it, is an excellent example of the genre (or use one your instructor assigns). It should be a team sport rather than an individual sport, and a real one rather than an invented one. Write a report explaining why you believe it is superior to others you have played that simulate the same sport. Be sure to cover at least the following areas:

• Document the athlete attributes that the game implements, including any special abilities that are associated with a particular position or role.

• Think about and describe how accurately the game simulates the strategy and tactics of the real sport. Are there any particular strengths or weaknesses? If so, point them out.

• Discuss the extent to which the game correctly implements the rules of the sport. Are there any rules that it does not enforce? How does it handle infractions that are not necessarily under the control of the player?

• Explore the user interface in the primary gameplay mode. Briefly document the mechanism mapping the athlete’s body or movements onto the control device. Note important indicators that appear on the screen and discuss how they improve the playing experience.

• Address the management features that the game offers. Can the player manage a team over the course of an entire season or several seasons? What challenges and actions are available for doing so? What kinds of things does the player have to think about off the field that he doesn’t have to think about on the field? If the player’s decisions during a match can affect the gameplay between matches, indicate how.

The design questions in the next section may help you to think about these issues. In your report, use screen shots to illustrate your points. End the case study with suggestions for improvement or, if you feel the game cannot be improved, suggestions for additional features that might be fun to have in the game.

Alternatively, choose a game that you believe is particularly bad. Do the same case study, explaining what is wrong and how it could be improved.

A case study is neither a review nor a design document; it is an analysis. You are not attempting to reverse-engineer the entire game but simply to explain how it works in a general way. Your instructor will tell you the desired scope of the assignment; we recommend from five to twenty pages.

Design Practice Questions

1. What sport are you simulating? Is it a real sport or a made-up one? If it’s real, do you need to get a license from a governing body?

2. What are the rules of the sport? If it’s a real sport, can you really implement them all, or will the game be limited to a subset?

3. What competition modes will be offered—single-player, competitive, cooperative, teams? Which ones make sense for the sport and which don’t?

4. In addition to playing a single match, what other game modes will be offered? Season, tournament, franchise, career?

5. What is the best perspective for playing the sport? Directly overhead, from the sidelines, from some other angle? What intelligence needs to be built into the camera to make the game easy to play? How will you handle displaying actions at widely separated points?

6. How do you map the actions of an athlete or an entire team of athletes to the controls available to the player? If you’re using a machine with motion-sensing capabilities, how will those movements turn into athletic activities? Will the functions of the buttons need to change during the course of play? When and why?

7. What additional markings should be drawn on the field of play to compensate for the player’s lack of depth perception? What pop-up windows over the play will the player need, and how do you prevent those from obscuring the action? When play is not in progress, how does the rest of the user interface look and work?

8. What roles will the player play in the sport—athlete, coach, general manager? When does the player switch from one to another and why?

9. What’s the general structure of the game? What screens are needed, and how do they lead from one to another? Can the player trade athletes among teams in the middle of the season, for example?

10. What changes must be made to the physics of the sport to make it playable by ordinary mortals?

11. What characteristics describe an athlete’s abilities? How will they affect the way her behavior looks on the screen? Will some athletes have ratings peculiar to the positions they play?

12. What states can the game be in, even in times between active play? How does an athlete behave in each state? What are her goals in each state, and in team play, what is the collective goal of the team in each state? How does the individual athlete’s behavior contribute to meeting the team’s goal?

13. Are you going to offer automatic simulation of matches? How will that be done?

14. What will the audio commentary be like? What events will it cover?

15. How does instant replay work?

About the Fundamentals of Game Design E-books

You understand the basic concepts of game design: gameplay, user interfaces, core mechanics, character design, and storytelling. Now you want to know how to apply them to individual game genres. These focused guides give you exactly what you need. They walk you through the process of designing for game genres and show you how to use the right techniques to create fun and challenging experiences for your players.

All of these e-books are available from the Peachpit website at www.peachpit.com/ernestadams.

Fundamentals of Shooter Game Design discusses designing for this huge and specialized market. It examines both the frenetic deathmatch style of play and the stealthier, more tactical approach.

Fundamentals of Action and Arcade Game Design is about the earliest, and still most popular, genre of interactive entertainment: action games. This genre may be divided into numerous subgenres such as fighting games, platformers, and others, which the e-book addresses in as much detail as there is room for. It also looks at the most popular hybrid genre, the action-adventure.

Fundamentals of Music, Dance, and Exercise Game Design addresses a popular new genre that has made gaming more accessible to new players than conventional action games are.

Fundamentals of Strategy Game Design discusses another genre that has been part of gaming since the beginning: strategy games, both real-time and turn-based.

Fundamentals of Role-Playing Game Design is about role-playing games, a natural outgrowth of pencil and paper games such as Dungeons & Dragons.

Fundamentals of Sports Game Design looks at sports games, which have a number of peculiar design challenges. The actual contest itself is designed by others; the trick is to map human athletic activities onto a screen and control devices.

Fundamentals of Vehicle Simulation Design addresses vehicle simulations: cars, planes, boats, and other, more exotic modes of transportation such as tanks.

Fundamentals of Construction and Simulation Game Design is about construction and management simulations in which the player tries to build and maintain something—a city, a theme park, a planet—within the limitations of an economic system.

Fundamentals of Adventure Game Design explores adventure games, an old and unique genre of gaming that continues to earn a great deal of critical attention by its strong storytelling and its visual aesthetics.

Fundamentals of Puzzle and Casual Game Design examines puzzle games and casual games in general.