Monday, November 14, 2016

Fighting Eleven #8: Gameplay Variations

I clearly have something going on here.

When you first start trying to define a project, there are lots of false starts, and lots of dead periods.

For me, at least.

Some people (like Garret) have a constant torrent of ideas, limited only by the miserly 24 hours in a day.

I'm more of a third line grinder, so to speak.

Right now, though, the ideas inside the game are coming very quickly.

One of the important aspects of Fighting Eleven (need a new title, feel free to submit) is that individual games must reflect team styles. Particularly in college, teams play with many different styles, and somehow the card game must capture that, so that your deck is strong against certain teams but not others.

I've captured the data on team pace and style, so I can model that in a sim sense.

What I'm still working on, though, is modeling it in a card game sense.

Originally, each card was going to have an offense (+) yardage and a defense (-) yardage. But players should be better against the pass than the run, for example, and teams should show their style by how often they choose run or pass.

So it may be that I need to have two defensive yardages, one each for the pass and rush.

This is going to make the gameplay more complicated, but it's also going to let you build your team deck in a particular style that will actually be reflected as you play the game. So you could build a deck that's strong against the pass, because there are so many strong passing teams in the college game today, but if you play Georgia Tech (to use a real world example), their running attack will give you fits.

I'm also thinking that if a team plays a run of passing or running plays, that it could affect the length of the half. So, for example, a team that plays X passing plays in a row would extend the half by one drive. Maybe the half is reduced by one drive if X running plays are used in a row.

Something like that.

That would affect the game scores to reflect team styles, which will give a stronger feeling of mirroring the real world, and it adds strategic options as well.

There are some other variations that could be more radical. I have pace data for each team, and it's even crossed my mind to give the user less time to play their card if the team they're playing has a higher pace on offense. I would have to make it optional, but that could be a fun option for advanced players.

I have so many things written down that I'm going to have to sort through them again and produce another master list, which makes me concerned that I'm going down rabbit holes, but having too many ideas is a problem I almost never have.

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