Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
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 recreate 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 game-
play 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 the automatic replay off 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 game-
play footage for sales and demonstrations. You should consider it an essential
feature of any sports game that you design.
