Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
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 imple-
ments 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 ran-
dom 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
Sports games, unlike most other 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
many people to play at once in the same room. In addition, console versions can
use a TV instead of a monitor on a desk, so all the players have a better view of the
action. Because many real sports are played by teams of people, these sports natu-
rally offer opportunities for multiplayer action.
