Fundamentals of Sports Game Design

Introduction

This book discusses how the principles of game design apply to sports games. We’ll begin by formally defining sports games and then address in detail the features that characterize them. We’ll also talk about the legal issues you’ll encounter if you make a game with a team or league license. Most of the book is dedicated to the structure of sports games: the types of gameplay, the problems of mapping actions to user input devices, and the design of athlete AIs for a rewarding experience. For a designer, sports games offer the unique challenge of simulating a well-known sport while at the same time modifying its mechanics to work with the video game hardware their players are using.

What Are Sports Games?

Sports games create a special ...