Casual Play vs Hard Core Play in Pro Strategy Football 2014

[Pro Strategy Football]

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)

[Julio Riddols]

Good call, sounds like an outstanding feature. Let players get used to simple playcalling, and if they want to they can dig deeper. I think its fine to leave it out of multiplayer though, people are going to want to scheme more specifically against a human opponent I think. Not only that, but hot seat mode helps keep the play calling from getting too monotonous since you're not calling 120 plays back to back and adjusting all the variables the whole way.

I remember with TLSF I used to call my offense most of the game and let the coordinator call the defense except for certain 3rd downs, but I always wanted a way to just call types of plays when I was ahead by a lot or behind by a lot because I still wanted some input over what the team did while also wanting to skim over the remaining time. Good to see that is possible now.

[Pro Strategy Football]

Originally Posted by Julio Riddols

Good call, sounds like an outstanding feature. Let players get used to simple playcalling, and if they want to they can dig deeper. I think its fine to leave it out of multiplayer though, people are going to want to scheme more specifically against a human opponent I think. Not only that, but hot seat mode helps keep the play calling from getting too monotonous since you're not calling 120 plays back to back and adjusting all the variables the whole way.

I remember with TLSF I used to call my offense most of the game and let the coordinator call the defense except for certain 3rd downs, but I always wanted a way to just call types of plays when I was ahead by a lot or behind by a lot because I still wanted some input over what the team did while also wanting to skim over the remaining time. Good to see that is possible now.

Oh, I should have been more clear! You can play Casual in multiplayer, you just can't switch back and forth. I'll probably add that back in multiplayer to let you switch, I just wasn't sure it would work well letting one guy use Casual and the other switches to Hard Core.

But yeah, I like all the options, too. :-)

Very cool that you played Tom Landry! That was sure fun to write, and he was a great man! Thanks!

[Julio Riddols]

Originally Posted by Pro Strategy Football

You can play Casual in multiplayer, you just can't switch back and forth.

Even better!

[Buccaneer]

I still have great memories of TLSF, the only computer football game that I liked. Being a Mac devotee at the time (1995), I was impressed with how great the game looked, esp. compared its contemporaries on the PC side, particularly FPS.

[Julio Riddols]

What versions of iOS is this compatible with?

[Pro Strategy Football]

Thanks, Buccaneer, that's cool!

Julio, it'll still run on iOS 5.1. At some point, I'm going to want to add the Facebook and Twitter API and allow "nudging" in Game Center games (unless I can get off GC first). The first two will require me to move to iOS 6, and the latter would require iOS 7. I hope that helps.

thanks!

[Julio Riddols]

Originally Posted by Pro Strategy Football

Thanks, Buccaneer, that's cool!

Julio, it'll still run on iOS 5.1. At some point, I'm going to want to add the Facebook and Twitter API and allow "nudging" in Game Center games (unless I can get off GC first). The first two will require me to move to iOS 6, and the latter would require iOS 7. I hope that helps.

thanks!

Sounds good, just wanted to make sure if I picked up an iPad that it was compatible with whatever OS I needed to have.

[Pro Strategy Football]

Ok, tonight was the first night I was able to test with iOS 8, and I was really a bit nervous, but all seems good, thankfully!

[Pro Strategy Football]

I know Apple is swamped with the new iOS and phones, and while I'm waiting on the approval (and working on career mode), I put together this quick video on Casual and Hard Core play.

2014 PSF Intro - YouTube

[SegRat]

Looks good