Mr Football is an Australian football sports management simulation but it is also a hero-based card collection game, where instead of orc barbarians and half-elf rogues your fighting squad is made up of ruckmen from Western Australia and half forward flanks from rural Queensland.
Traditionally, sports games have given their “heroes” percentage ratings for various physical aspects which tend to get combined into one single number. Lionel Messi is a 97 but Pele is a 98, so you know instantly that Pele is better than Messi – most players won’t look under the hood of hero design any further than that. This is okay for games without much strategic depth, like FIFA Mobile which is an arcade title at heart, but I was trying to go a bit deeper with Mr Football as it is a management sim without any direct control over players.
The other thing I have tried to do with my game is to give the players more personality and differentiation, so that they are not just a collection of numbers, and that the aspects of a player other than physical ones would have direct effects within matches. This is something that Star Trek Timelines does well with its traits for Missions and unique crew skills for ship battles. Blood Bowl also does an excellent job with its skills in allowing different paths for development of players, so that some players have access to moves that others don’t.
This is kind of radical for a sports game, though I must confess that I have never played Football Manager so I don’t even know if I am standing on the shoulders of giants with this stuff. Perhaps FM preceded me with this approach, I missed the boat on that game. Hopefully, even if that is true, I end up at a new place compared to them given I have separate influences.
Anyway, the system I came up with was, quoting from the Attributes page of the wiki:
- A rating of one to five stars, where every player starts at one star but may be merged into duplicate cards to reach his full rating;
- Six physical abilities in a range which is calculated by dice rolls for every match: Strength, Agility, Kicking, Quickness, Dash and Endurance;
- Five football skills related to their on-field position, also with a range;
- One to three intangible personal talents – Leadership, Role, Guts, Inspiration, Respect and Communication – which are mostly used in journeys;
- Any number of traits which can represent personality, play style, background or any other inherent quality. Traits are mostly used to qualify or disqualify players from matches or journeys.
Abilities and skills have minima and maxima made up of a base number, a coin flip with a multiplier and a dice roll with a different multiplier, producing 12 possible results in a staggered bell curve graph (more on that in another post). The range of possible values for a player in each ability, skill and talent are dependent on the star rating and fitness of the player. Fitness is treated in much the same way levels are in a hack-and-slash medieval RPG, starting at 1% and ending at 100% just as a ranger or priest would begin at level 1 fighting rats, then cap out at 100. Stars are effectively another kind of RPG level, a multiplier to the base. This part of the system is heavily influenced by Star Trek Timelines.
One thing I am doing with these attributes that I haven’t seen much of anywhere else is rerolling them for every match, and then degrading them over the course of a match through a Fatigue mechanic. Normally when Crom the fighter in an RPG has a ST of 18, he keeps that ST of 18 no matter how tired he gets before or during battle unless he is injured or poisoned. This represents the “any given Sunday” aspect of sport, as even the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo can have good days and bad days depending on their mood when they wake up on the morning of a match, and even the best athletes only have so much gas in the tank to keep running at peak speed. I suppose this is somewhat analogous to a Hit Point mechanic, with some key differences in operation.
The intention with creating such a complex network of attributes is to widen the pool of viable players to use in various modes of the game. Some players are physically gifted, especially young players, but lack intangible qualities that come with experience – and vice versa. Football is a sport where actions without the ball in hand are sometimes of equal or greater importance than those in possession, especially communication amongst players and with the coach about structure and tactics. More attributes and classes of attributes enable wider sets of permutations in hero creation, and allows for specialisation beyond simple physical prowess.
I have written a few of these blog posts now, and I am acutely aware that it all sounds a bit hollow before I have actually released the game. Back to work!