Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
improving the quarterback's throwing accuracy and the receiver's catching skills. If
you allow the player to switch between arcade mode and simulation mode, he can
adjust the behavior of the game to suit his tastes.
To implement arcade mode, you have to decide what sort of changes to the real
game would make it more exciting. If you want your game to have both arcade and
simulation modes, start with the serious simulation first and then create the adjust-
ments that make it arcadelike. Serious simulations are much more difficult to tune,
and it's important to get them right first. If you start with an arcadelike design and
then try to make it serious, you might never get it right.
Simulating Matches Automatically
Sports games that simulate an entire season for a whole league of teams often pro-
vide a means of simulating matches automatically without the player's having to
play them. Each team in American professional baseball currently plays 162
matches in a season. With 30 teams in the two leagues and 2 teams in each match,
this totals 2430 matches—only the most rabid fan would want to play each match
personally. To generate results for matches that the player doesn't play, you need a
way of simulating a match. Of course, you want the resulting scores to accurately
reflect the relative strengths of the teams: A bad team should be able to beat a good
team occasionally but not often.
COMPUTER VERSUS COMPUTER
The simplest way to simulate matches automatically is to let the computer play out
the match in computer versus computer mode (as described in the earlier section
“Competition Modes”) and record the results. A game with a good simulation
model should produce scores that reflect the real abilities of the competitors.
However, if the player wants to generate results for a match that she doesn't want to
play herself, she probably wants it done quickly. You can speed up the process by
turning off the graphics. Because displaying the graphics often takes up the major-
ity of the computer's time, an entire match can be simulated invisibly in a few
seconds, and the computer can report only the result. Electronic Arts'
Earl Weaver
Baseball
game did this successfully. When you implement a nondisplayed mode like
this, test the game to be sure that the results without graphics are the same as those
with graphics.
GENERATING FAKE RESULTS
Instead of simulating entire matches with the graphics turned off, many games fake
it—in effect, they roll dice to generate game scores. The dice are loaded somewhat
so that good teams get high scores and bad teams get low ones, and whichever
team rolls the highest score wins the match.
