Howdy, I'm working on a football-sim game. I was wondering how you would attempt to battle this critique: "It's just a spreadsheet." Since this game is exactly a spreadsheet, how can I make it more fun? Some of my ideas: Use of color in a consistent and meaningful fashion: -Instead of giving a player a "Throw Power" rating of 107, display it in a bar chart format, where the color of the bar goes from red to green the higher the stat. -When a play executes, have a "play display" with circles representing each player in each position. Have the play take about three seconds to unfold during which the circles fade to red or green depending on how well each player does. -During a training exercise, a bar fills up for a few seconds, going from red to green depending on how much success a player has with the exercise. What else do you guys think?

I'm not a hardcore football fan, so this may be off the mark, but the "it's just a spreadsheet" complaint I think derives from the sense that a game is emotionless, or does't present any sense of humanity.

So is there any way you can humanize those little spreadsheet cells? Without invoking the horror that is Clippy in MS Excel, there must be something that can be done to create the illusion that there are characters at work behind the numbers (or in front of them, better yet).

What about vignettes that describe what's happening? Or UI that has a more humanistic look to it?

I agree with Wavinator... you should try to add more "human" elements to it. I like your color ideas; a more interesting and engaging UI is important. But if you're catering to hardcore football fans, I think they'd want to be able to control all the relevant stats directly, so having the numbers available as well is important. I don't actually know much about football but here are some things that might work:

- A newspaper could come up with a generated headline and photo pertaining to the game ("Whatshisname scores three touchdowns in the last quarter, winning the game for the whatevers!") This kind of thing happens in the SimCity games a lot, giving a more realistic feel to what's going on with the invisible people in your city.

- Rip off the style of football coverage on Fox and similar shows. Like how the stats for a player or the score "swoooosh" in from the side of the tv screen on a refelctive 3d thing, and play some triumphant trumpet music as you're getting ready to start the next play. If you can make your UI similar to what football fans are used to seeing on TV, it will make it much more real for them, even if you're not showing any actual football.

- Sound effects are important. Cheering or booing crowds, referee whistles, that sound of four guys ramming into eachother at high speeds ;). If you can find a decent voice actor, having a commentator voice make a few quick voice clips for common events would add a lot as well.

I see two directions we could go with this. My reply to the original post depends on how you answer the following question: "Are you making a football-themed computer game or are you making a football simulator?"

There is a notable difference between a simulator and a game.

Games are designed with entertainment foremost in mind. The very gameplay itself must be constructed in such a way that playing it (regardless of how it's themed) is entertaining. Are you building a football-themed strategy game where the player must manage the strengths (perhaps stats?) of the players on his team, and call for plays to out-maneuver the strengths of the his opponents' team?

The absolute best games are the ones that take as much artistic license with reality as necessary to make the game fun. SoulCalibur is a fun game but my experience in sport fencing and Haidong Gumdo have very little in common with it. It is a game rather than a simulator.


Sometimes people confuse simulators for games. Simulators are not designed to be fun, they are designed to emulate an aspect of reality. Reality is not always fun.

If you are building a simulator, you do indeed run the risk of making a boring piece of software. The entertainment value to be had from a simulator is found in the fact that if you become good at the simulator, there's a fair chance you could be tolerably decent at the real thing.

This drives even harder the question: What are you simulating? Because simulators emulate reality, you must be very specific, very REAL in the way you go about the simulation. Are you simulating the act of coaching a team? Or are you simulating the act of playing it?

It's difficult to come up with ideas and solutions for you when I haven't ever seen the game. But here are some nice, general rules of thumb that can help any player:

Try to add as much viscera and chunky goodness as you can. People love animations of power, violence, and mayhem. Games whose gameplay are implicitly boring (ie: Diablo by Blizzard Entertainment) tend to make-up for that fact by making them just fun to watch. Pads smashing, big dog piles, and other cuddly (although ultimately meaningless) things can help your "football-sim" be more entertaining.

If you are going for more of a game and less of a simulator, try to take some artistic license. Throw-in oddball features that you don't see in actual NFL games. The table-top game "Blood Bowl" by GamesWorkshop had some adorable chunky bits in it: Snipers in the stadium, linebackers who drove steam rollers, etc..

Ultimately, underneath, every game is just a spread sheet. The thing that differentiates the fun ones from the boring ones is how well we hide that fact.

Wav & Wings,

I like the ideas you have, and they tend to coincide with the various brainstorming ideas I had. Sounds are important, as well as dramatic presentation. Like, have the word SACK smack against the screen, those kinds of things. The trick is to not "interfere too much" with the actual gameplay. A game should go by relativley quick (I would imagine 20 minutes should be the upper limit) but have enough bells and whistles to keep it from being a scrolling display of text. I'm a big fan of the Sports Page headline concept as well.

Ish,

Woa, I am definately not headed in the direction of the reality-based simulator you described. Thats why I called it a football-sim *game*, which is a pretty common description for what the style of game I'm making. There are many sports-sims out there that are games, not algorithmic models of reality. See http://www.solecismic.com/, http://www.ootpdevelopments.com, and http://www.400softwarestudios.com for current examples.

The basic concept is to take a 'football' game like Madden and leave out the finger-twitch-control-the-players part. Since you're taking that out, you fill in the other aspects of team and organization management that games like Madden approach in a very shallow manner (if at all). The idea is to have the player fill in as either coach, trainer, scout, GM, owner, or any combination of the above.

On the flip side, the rules of football (american, by the way) are well known and players will expect the game to respond in a way that seems to correspond to the well known rules of football. This means that there is a definate grounding in reality and I'll be assuming that my players know more about football than you or I know about Sword Fencing when we play Soul Caliber.


The issue is that these games tend to end up as a complete numbers-reading exercise. All you see are numbers for corresponding player attributes, salaries, health, performance, and everything else. The idea is to hide the numbers (although not totally like wings pointed out) and replace it somehow with something that entices emotion and excitement while still getting the information across clearly.

Thanks,

-Ben