Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
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 (see
Figure 16.2
). This will allow
players to create dream teams or famous teams from the past. If you want to pre-
vent 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 unbeat-
able play strategies, they lose some respect for the game.)
FIGURE 16.2
The athlete-creation
screen in
Pro Evolution
Soccer 2008
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 combina-
tion that the game AI is completely unable to beat, regardless of the circumstances.
