Questions about sports games.

I have been considering a long term project of designing an American Football game. I want it to look and feel like a classic madden game. I just have no idea where to get started. What steps should I prioritize? If you were to design a game like John Madden Football, how would you plan out your development?

 

If I were you, I would start from tutorials.

 

I've done tutorials for years and taken several Udemy classes. I was just wondering how one would begin to develop an early '90s Madden game as there aren't many resources on sports games. Unless you know specific tutorials that would be useful for finishing this project.

 

You need split your design into smaller steps.

• Make ball roll / move.
• Make players move - including inputs.
• Make players interact with ball.
• Create ball -> goal post, outs etc interactions.
• Set game states accordingly.
• Make simple AI, if required.
• Make GUI.

All you need is in tutorials. You just need to pick up right bits, and join together.

 

@Antypodish is exactly right. There is no significant difference between sports games and non-sports games. Particularly if you are trying to emulate an existing game or genre (90s Madden game in this case), the design is already worked out for you. Just start developing, keep making it look more and more like what you want, and stop when satisfied.

 

I've worked on a lot of sports games and best advice I can give is to prototype your match engine as first priority.
Without that there is no game, but once you have it working you can build everything else (database, UI, etc) around it.

Start with a simple 2D prototype where you are concentrating on fundamentals like player positioning and role based behaviour for a particular play.
(You can do it in 3D if you want, just dont worry about animation or anything like initially.)

Ideally you want your AI to be deterministic, this will massively help you to debug your matches.
In other words if you feed in the same variables to your AI you get the same output every time.
Then, for example, if your QB misbehaves in a certain situation you can replicate it easily and fix it.

Once you have AI playing against each other you can start thinking about introducing user input, but this approach will give you a solid foundation to build upon.

 

Besides starting with a smaller project to get your feet wet, I'd do the following:

1) Go back and play the old Madden games again, thinking about what you want to borrow and what you want to do differently
2) Create a wish list of everything you want in your game
3) Scope out your game by curating your wish list by priority and estimating time
4) For unknowns from the previous step, investigate how to do certain things, what 3rd party assets may be available to save time, etc

At that point you should have a good idea what to do with the project, what is going to be in it, how long it will take, etc.