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Wednesday, January 31, 2007 |
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MVP 07 NCAA - New Mini Games!!
Hey Everyone,
Welcome back to the world of MVP 07 NCAA Baseball. So, today’s entry is all about MVP 07’s new mini-games. Truth be told we have 2.5 new mini-games. 2 based on our new pitching mechanic we’ve dubbed Rock and Fire pitching, and a significant update to our Classic batting mini-game. Whenever we are developing new mini-games, we want them to be fun, but also to serve as a place to practice. We are very pleased with what we ended up with and think you’ll dig them too.
Firstly, we will dive into the Rock and Fire challenge. The idea for this game came up during pre-production. Have you owned a dart board that you flipped over and had a baseball game on the back? If so, you know where we’re coming from. If not, you should get one, it is a lot of fun. I remember playing the baseball game lots more than the traditional dart game. Anyways, the idea is you take turns throwing darts at the 1B, 2B, 3B, and HR spots on the board and try to avoid all of the Strike, Out, and Double Play spots, while using “ghost runners” to keep score. For Rock and Fire challenge, we built our test bed by using the core of our Classic pitching mini-game. Then we added the base paths and base runner icons to the on screen display. From there, it was just a matter of tweaking, tuning, and balancing things until it played out just right. In RNF Challenge, you start by aiming specific pitches at like-colored blocks in the strike zone. If you hit a chunk of like-colored blocks with the correct pitch, it will spawn a “special” block. The more blocks in your combo, the higher the value of your spawned special block. Hit the special blocks to get runners on base and then hit more to drive them in. You have a specific amount of time to score a specific amount of runs per round. Score the required runs in a given round and you will progress to the next round. Pretty straight forward. The first couple of rounds are relatively easy once you get the hang of things, but in order to play thru all rounds and snag a spot on the leader boards, you will be required to have pin-point accuracy on all of your pitches.
 -Click here for larger image
We were so pleased with how Rock and Fire Challenge turned out that we decided to look into the possibility of putting together a 2 player, split-screen/heads up version. And so Rock and Fire Showdown was born. We used the core of our split screen code for Home Run Showdown, a perennial MVP favorite, and started tinkering. We had to do some camera and on screen display work to frame the split screen action in a way that looked cool, but also displayed the all of the necessary information in an intuitive way. This is tricky because there are a lot of things going on in a head to head match up. We also decided to set RNF Showdown in a more traditional baseball format. You can choose to play for 3, 6, and 9 innings game, where player 1 pitches at Offensive tiles, and Player 2 throws at Defensive tiles, switching sides in the middle of each inning. There is actually a lot more depth and strategy to RNF Showdown than we had anticipated. While on Offense, do you manufacture runs by going after smaller chunks of blocks, or load the bases and go for the HR tile? On Defense, do you try to focus on hitting just Strike blocks, or wait until the Offensive player has runners on base and try and roll a pair? RNF Showdown definitely got the development team’s competitive juice flowing. One programmer in particular beat the tar out of me every time we played and talked smack the whole way. I still think he had some sort of “beat the producer cheat” enabled. One word of advice for you guys, if a programmer ever challenges you to a game that he has worked on, use caution. It’s like playing poker against a magician. You are probably going to lose. All in all, we are very pleased with our Rock and Fire mini-games and think they do a great job of showcasing our new pitching mechanic in a fun and intuitive way.
As I mentioned earlier, we also performed a significant update to our Classic batting mini-game. Since we were going with a “Road to Omaha” theme in this year’s game with all of the added College Authenticity, we thought it could be carried into other areas of the game as well. Essentially, we gave the mini game a massive facelift. Since we already had the tractors, we decided to add some corn fields and scarecrows beyond the outfield fence. For those of you familiar with our Classic batting mini-game, you will know that hitting a tractor with a batted ball gives you a juicy bonus. Well, hitting a Scarecrow beyond the fence is much more difficult and even more rewarding. If you have ever had trouble progressing into the later rounds, hitting a Scarecrow or two will definitely make things much easier. So make sure you practice up on your analog Load and Fire batting. I have to give some big credit to our Art team for putting in the extra time to make this update happen. Many of them have been on MVP for years and have always taken great pride in their work. We could not have shipped this game without their help, that’s for sure.
 -Click here for larger image
Well that’s it for my MVP 07 blog entry on mini games. I hope they give you a good breakdown of some of our new features, and an idea of what it was like making MVP 07. At the end of the day, we do this for you guys. Shipping a game that we are all proud of and that our fans enjoy is what MVP has been all about, and this year is no different. We hope you take the time to check out MVP 07 and have as much fun playing it as the dev team and myself had making it.
Thanks for your continued support of MVP and thanks again to our friends at IGN for providing us with this forum to talk with our fans,
Trey Smith and the MVP Dev Team
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