Pro Strategy Football
10-03-2014, 07:23 PM
While I'm waiting for Apple approval of PSF 2014, I thought I'd share some of the goals for this year's version. I'll post about the UI, Casual Play, Career Play, and more.
The biggest thing I wanted to accomplish was to make the game more attractive and playable to new people who wanted to play a strategy football game but didn't want to have to be football experts.
First, I've revamped the menu system. This new approach helps you see play categories and offers help on every single option in the game, so you can learn about every formation, play, shift option, pass pattern, and more, and the pros and cons of each. The new menu system also allows more expansion than the old system. I'll be able to easily add more formations, plays, etc - I could even recategorize plays, and long-term could let players customize their own menus.
Second, I've added Casual Mode. This is great for beginners or for people who don't want to get bogged down in all the details, and it's even fun for experts who want to play a faster game. Let me give an example.
- in Hard Core mode, you could call Pro Set, Strong Right, motion your flanker, throw a medium pass to your split end, change his route to a comeback, and tell the halfback to stay in and block.
- in Casual mode, you lean over to your offensive coordinator and say "Medium Pass" and leave all those other details to him. He will choose the formation, receiver, etc, using the same logic the AI uses when calling his own plays.
Defense is the same way. In Hard Core, you might call 4-3-4, shift over, Man coverage, Pass focus, blitz the MLB and ROLB and double-team the tight end.
In Casual mode, you simply say to your defensive coordinator, "I think he's throwing a short pass, defend against it."
AND you can switch back and forth between the two during any game (except Game Center multiplayer, I still haven't decided what effect it might have to let each user switch during those)
The biggest thing I wanted to accomplish was to make the game more attractive and playable to new people who wanted to play a strategy football game but didn't want to have to be football experts.
First, I've revamped the menu system. This new approach helps you see play categories and offers help on every single option in the game, so you can learn about every formation, play, shift option, pass pattern, and more, and the pros and cons of each. The new menu system also allows more expansion than the old system. I'll be able to easily add more formations, plays, etc - I could even recategorize plays, and long-term could let players customize their own menus.
Second, I've added Casual Mode. This is great for beginners or for people who don't want to get bogged down in all the details, and it's even fun for experts who want to play a faster game. Let me give an example.
- in Hard Core mode, you could call Pro Set, Strong Right, motion your flanker, throw a medium pass to your split end, change his route to a comeback, and tell the halfback to stay in and block.
- in Casual mode, you lean over to your offensive coordinator and say "Medium Pass" and leave all those other details to him. He will choose the formation, receiver, etc, using the same logic the AI uses when calling his own plays.
Defense is the same way. In Hard Core, you might call 4-3-4, shift over, Man coverage, Pass focus, blitz the MLB and ROLB and double-team the tight end.
In Casual mode, you simply say to your defensive coordinator, "I think he's throwing a short pass, defend against it."
AND you can switch back and forth between the two during any game (except Game Center multiplayer, I still haven't decided what effect it might have to let each user switch during those)