Sports Games - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 506

works in a general way. Your instructor will tell you the desired scope of the assign-
ment; we recommend from five to twenty pages.
Design Practice QUESTIONS
1. What sport are you simulating? Is it a real sport or a made-up one? If it's real, do
you want to get a license from a governing body?
2. What are the rules of the sport? If it's a real sport, can you really implement
them all, or will the game be limited to a subset?
3. What competition modes will be offered—single-player, competitive, coopera-
tive, teams? Which ones make sense for the sport and which don't?
4. In addition to playing a single match, what other game modes will be offered?
Season, tournament, franchise, career?
5. What is the best perspective for playing the sport? Directly overhead, from the
sidelines, from some other angle? What intelligence needs to be built into the cam-
era to make the game easy to play? How will you handle displaying actions at
widely separated points?
6. How do you map the actions of an athlete or an entire team of athletes to the
controls available to the player? If you're using a machine with motion-sensing
capabilities, how will those movements turn into athletic activities? Will the func-
tions of the buttons need to change during the course of play? When and why?
7. What additional markings should be drawn on the field of play to compensate
for the player's lack of depth perception? What pop-up windows over the play will
the player need, and how do you prevent those from obscuring the action? When
play is not in progress, how does the rest of the user interface look and work?
8. What roles will the player play in the sport? Athlete, coach, general manager?
When does the player switch from one to another and why?
9. What's the general structure of the game? What screens are needed, and how do
they lead from one to another? Can the player trade athletes among teams in the
middle of the season, for example?
10. What changes must be made to the physics of the sport to make it playable by
ordinary mortals?
11. What characteristics describe an athlete's abilities? How will they affect the way
her behavior looks on the screen? Will some athletes have ratings peculiar to the
positions they play?