Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
player to choose which athlete to control and allow him to switch quickly from one
athlete to another as conditions change. This often requires significant changes to
the user interface as play progresses; the functions of the buttons have to change if
the player assumes control of an athlete with a specialized function—for example,
switching from the thrower to a sweeper in curling after delivering the rock.
Camera Models
In one-on-one sports games, the camera model is seldom difficult to manage.
Choose a spot where the camera gives a clear view of the athletes and where their
movements and activities will map neatly onto the machine's input devices. As a
general rule, you shouldn't do sports games in the first person. A lot of the fun of
watching a sport is in seeing the athletes exercise their skills. For example, you
could make a tennis game in the first person, but you wouldn't get to see your ath-
lete playing tennis, and you might not even get to see your racket hit the ball. An
overhead perspective, with your tennis player at the bottom of the screen and your
opponent at the top, presents a much more natural view and lets you see both ath-
letes running, jumping, serving, and so on.
Managing the camera for a team game is trickier, particularly when the focus of
attention moves from place to place. With most soccerlike games, an end view or
a side view, from a somewhat elevated position, works best. With large fields, you
won't be able to get the whole field on the screen, so you'll need to design an intel-
ligent camera that follows the ball.
NOTE
Some angles
don't work at all.
American football is
almost unplayable
from a side view
because too many
athletes block the
player's view of other
athletes, and he can't
see gaps in the line.
Sports in which actions take place at widely separated locations pose a special chal-
lenge in choosing a perspective. In most sports, the action takes place around one
focal point: the leader of a race, the ball in most ballgames, the skier on the slope.
Sports such as baseball and cricket, however, offer two focal points: on the ball and
on the runners. In baseball, the two focal points can be separated by as much as
400 feet. You can't show both the runners and the ball without zooming out to a
blimp view so high that it's difficult to see anything clearly.
Most baseball video games implement a picture-in-picture solution: The camera
follows the ball, but a small diagram of the baseball diamond in one corner of the
screen shows the positions of the runners, often indicated by colored dots (see
Figure 16.4
). When a runner reaches a base, his dot changes color to indicate that
he is safe. The player controlling the fielders watches the main screen, and the one
controlling the runners watches the diagram (keeping one eye on the main screen
to see if the ball is coming). Because cricket uses only two stumps instead of four
bases, this arrangement works even better.
