New to GS; Can I make a sport coaching RPG?
Mezirah
Member Posts: 2
Hello, I'd like to make a menu based game where I manage a small roster of soccer or football players with statistics where I play a match 1 by 1, and as a coach you pick the strategy based on the opponent. I don't want any animation but probably a lot of tables and some gameplay coding. Are there any templates I can find so I can pick the brain of another author? I really have no idea how to begin. I want to be able to recruit new players too as the team gains fame etc.
Thanks
Thanks
Comments
Unless you hire someone to make your game for you (better to do it yourself) no-one is going to know exactly what you want and need other than you!
What I'd suggest is breaking your game down into 'questions' for yourself. For example:
How do I display players on the screen?
What different modes are there?
What variables will affect what?
How will I show the games being played?
How will the player stats affect the outcome of a match?
What options will I offer?
Will there be leagues?
How many teams will be in each league?
How do I sort out which teams play which?
And so on and so forth.
For example, if you have injuries in the game, you will have to account for that by having an 'injured' attribute.
The injured attribute could affect:
Performance (other stats)
Whether or not the player is even picked.
Whether the team can play (if all players are injured, what happens?)
When will the player 'heal'?
So you can see that a single attribute could potentially affect other attributes (player stats) and will even introduce some new ones (healing time/rest).
Then we can probably help with how you make specific parts of the game, as opposed to the whole game.
I think you have the right idea about tables. They'd be pretty useful in a game like this!
It's a pretty big undertaking. We can't write your whole game for you! The point is that you have to look at every tiny thing in your game and account for it somehow. Imagine someone who's never played your game asking what everything does.
This is what a designer does. He/She constantly asks 'what if?' and 'How does that affect everything?'.
Not just 'What if I made a game like Angry Birds but with dogs?'
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I'll give you an example from something I'm thinking about:
I'm thinking of making a card game of sorts.
I know that I want the opponent to put down up to four cards each turn. There are four types of card.
The player will use his own cards to affect the opponents score.
So, just from this small description I need to ask myself:
How do I pick the cards for the opponent? I will need a list of cards to choose from (tables!). I will have to work out how to get the game to pick one of each type of card, and not to pick duplicates.
What this suggests is that I need to distinguish, with variables, the card types, the number of cards available, the type of cards already used etc etc.
Next I ask 'how many cards should the player have in their hand?'
I don't know. I'd have to work that out. But I DO know that I have to have a system that would randomly pick cards from a pile. So I need to work on that!
How do the player cards affect the opponents cards? Well, there'd have to be a common attribute between player and opponent cards to determine which one would score better.
Can the player and the opponent pick from the same set of cards? Maybe. I'd have to work it out. There are some fantastic card games, some use the same decks, other allow you to customise your decks, others use asynchronous decks. Which would work best for my game?
And what about the score? What would that be? How does the player win? Again, I have to work it out.
By doing all this, the game mechanics come into view and you can start working out what needs to be done even at a very basic level. The game starts to build itself.
Next, when the basics are done, I'd add modifiers to the game, but these would have been thought of long before they were implemented.
I've rambled a bit! Sorry!
QS