Ages ago, I forget which version of the game, I added the team chemistry model to Front Office Football. When designing the feature, I tried to stay true to the fundamental piece of advice my “mentor” in game development offered when I was starting out in this business.
“Create the game you want to play.”
This seems simple on its surface. Why do any of us create games? We’re programmed to play games. As children, we do it automatically. You watch kittens and puppies, and they play both to entertain themselves and to model skills they’ll need as adults. Play is part of who we are.
Designing a game about running a professional football team, I tried to stay true to that concept. What are the pieces of team management that entertain and help us learn relevant skills so that we feel, at least (and obviously the analogy breaks down somewhat at this point), that we could run a successful franchise?
The other fundamental piece of advice I’d give to beginning game developers is something I read from an interview with Sid Meier, who designed the Civilization series among many other great games.
“Games are a series of interesting choices.”
What makes choices interesting? If you feel your choice affects your outcome in a game, that usually makes it interesting. So I try to remain true to that concept. Everything you do in Front Office Football has some effect that you can identify. At least in theory. There are so many choices that uniquely identifying cause and effect can be very difficult.
But that alone isn’t quite enough. A choice with an effect isn’t always interesting. For instance, many customers have complained about the time management screen in The College Years. You’re essentially day-planning for your student athletes, deciding how much time to spend socializing (a happier athlete performs more to his ability), studying (a failing athlete may become ineligible) and training (a more skilled athlete reaches his potential). These choices affect outcome. But are they interesting? Maybe at first, but doing this for dozens of players every single year gets old. A game should not be drudgery.
Choices have to be relevant as well. It might be interesting in TCY, for example, to have each player choose a Pokemon character that best reflects his talent. Player development would be dependent on intelligent choices. But how does this relate to college football? When you’re choosing Pokemon, are you still playing a game about college football?
If you keep all of this in mind when you design a game, odds are you’ll come up with good ideas because it does come naturally to all of us.
I wish I could update people on the exact status of new games. It’s complicated. When you’re a one-person game company there are positives and negatives. One negative is that I’m not on any schedule. I don’t have to answer to deadlines. It’s done when it’s done, and I’m not going to release something just because of date on a calendar. Back when EA Sports was publishing Front Office Football, they had deadlines and deliverables because others were working on the game and my producer had other aspects to manage, like the PR campaign. So we set realistic deadlines in advance and I worked around the clock to ensure that the game was the quality I wanted when it came to time to deliver. That was a positive, though exhausting.
One positive to being a solo developer is that I can always step away and redesign something that I feel doesn’t quite meet my design goals.
And one example is the chemistry model in Front Office Football. The initial idea I had is that your job as a general manager is to assemble a team. But a team is more than just the sum of its parts. That’s an intangible asset. The media often refers to this intangible as chemistry. If the media witnesses, for example, a player like Colin Kaepernick creating some sort of distraction, it’s irresistible to write about the potential effect on team chemistry. Of course, that’s mostly nonsense. Even if they get some poor schnook on the record saying “it really upsets me when Kaepernick sits on the bench during the National Anthem,” how in the world can some writer behind a desk 1,000 miles from San Francisco know what’s in that player’s head during the game itself? Is a linebacker going to stuff the wrong gap because Kaepernick pissed him off? Is a safety going to make a brilliant interception because he was inspired by Kaepernick’s sense of social conscience? Probably not. Who knows? Definitely not that guy behind that desk.
So for chemistry to work as a feature in a game, it has to be tangible. Your decisions must matter and you must be able to see the results and potentially identify the effect.
How do you make the intangible seem real? That’s a question easily handled in a game like Front Office Football. You’re already accustomed to paging through data, so it follows naturally that chemistry can be presented as data. There are leaders based on position groups. Leaders are determined by the strength of their personalities and their experience. Personality strengths are tangible player attributes. Affinities and conflicts are localized within position groups and between team leaders. It’s a relatively simple system that fits neatly within the roster window. You can see how many affinities and conflicts your team has and this has an effect on team performance. One way to improve your team is increase affinities and decrease conflicts.
That’s the general design. But is it interesting? I wrestled with that question at the time. In real life, personality strength is something we can observe. People with stronger personalities experience more conflict. They also build relationships. Early on, I realized that I couldn’t model the “toxic” personality – someone with a strong personality who generates conflict but doesn’t build affinities. Once you make toxicity tangible, you have no choice but to get rid of that player. Now you’re no longer making decisions. Therefore, the system had to be “fair” in that everyone has a somewhat equal chance of generating affinities and conflicts. That’s not perfectly true in Front Office Football (in a minute I’ll reveal something I’ve never read in comments before, so it may be new to most of you – I’m sure there are veteran players who have figured this out) but it’s mostly true.
Is it interesting? If purely random, I don’t think so. If you draft a player and all of a sudden you’re dealing with the conflicts that arise randomly and naturally in a locker room, outside of your control, that doesn’t feel good. So I realized right away that relationships needed to be predictable. That led to a model based on astrology. Personally, I don’t believe in astrology. Not in the slightest. The idea that our personalities depend on what day of the year we were born seems difficult to believe. There are veteran player scouts who swear astrology works when picking quarterbacks, but the sample sizes involved are so small that statistical significance is low. I don’t buy it. But we’ve all heard of astrology, and the notion that astrological signs dictate relationships is conceptually easy. It made the transition from intangible to tangible predictable – a decision in your control that you can manage.
Incidentally, the “reveal” above is that player personality itself is somewhat tied to astrological sign in the player creation model. You get generally stronger personalities with some signs (and more intelligent players with other signs, etc.) Therefore, you can get a little more bang for the buck if you focus your leaders on specific signs, if the opportunity arises.
The downside of this entire system is that moment I’ve had, and many of you have had, when you’re looking at a player and you realize how ridiculous it is to turn down a solid free agent linebacker because, like, he’s an Aquarius. All of a sudden, I’ve (as the designer) suddenly and rather deliberately reminded you that this is just a game, not a model of professional football. At least I recognized this right away and made the entire chemistry model optional. When you turn off chemistry when starting a new career, it’s absent from the game (except with the player creation itself) in that conflicts and affinities and position leaders aren’t tracked at all.
Why am I writing about this?
Well, I’m somewhere in development of Front Office Football Eight. I don’t know when (or if) it will be done. It’s incredibly ambitious in that game planning and play calling is completely new (this is making the in-game play-calling 100% more enjoyable in my own opinion – that’s been the best part of this development, though I think it will improve the league experience as well). So I need to ensure that this work doesn’t break the game engine and that the game engine continues to produce realistic results. I’m also taking the time to implement some features that have been on my “list” for ages (this week, for example, I replaced the model for determining penalties, allowing a reasonable method for determining the individual responsibility for penalties – I didn’t just want to pick a random number, as the old engine would have required).
I’m currently toying with another item on that list: defensive team captains. The concept is that your team identity is somewhat determined by your quarterback on offense, and your defensive captain on defense (most likely your starting middle linebacker in a 43 and your starting weak-side outside linebacker in a 34). This would then lead to a chemistry concept based on attributes, but not necessarily the interaction of attributes like the astrological model requires. So Kaepernick’s protest becomes insignificant, rather than potentially damaging as if this backup is a Leo being added to a Scorpio-based position group. I think it’s more realistic and it doesn’t have to be optional.