Mutant Football League Dev Diary #2 Game Connection Recap
We had a fun and productive time at the Game Developers Conference and Game Connection, where we met up with a lot industry friends, and had the opportunity to meet many great folks from the publishing sector of the industry. My business partner and technical director for Mutant Football League, Maxim Novikov, joined me, as well as Chad Nimmo, The MFL’s social media director. As you know, the game is still early in development, so we weren’t even planning on going to the event, but the game got nominated for Most Promising IP at the Game Connection Awards, so we had to go. Unfortunately, we didn’t win, but the nomination earned MFL a lot of awareness around the show. The team had meetings from 9:00am to 6:00pm without breaks and sometimes our meetings were even double-booked. We showed the publishers and gaming press live gameplay of Mutant Football League for the first time, and it generated a lot of interest and positive feedback. People liked what they saw and the general direction of the game. All-in-all, it was an eventful show for us. Will the trip result in some much needed funding for us? Only time will tell. We feel positive about everything, and even if we don’t find a partner to work with from the show, we will find one soon and they are going to get a kick-ass product.
Okay, enough of that. You guys want to hear where we are with the game, right? We just put our first pass at Defensive AI into the game. Defenders are as stupid as door nails right now and I can score at will against them, but the backbone of the AI is there. Players are covering zones, blitzing, and can go into man-to-man coverages (both soft and tight). However, their ball awareness is not the best right now (they don’t get into a good position to make a play) as is their pursuit (angle of attack against ball carrier), but again, this is to be expected and nothing I haven’t seen before. We have a lot of work to do to get it to where it needs to be to have a really fun game, but we have AI Defense now, which is so awesome!
This coming month we will start putting in Offense and Special Teams AI and when we’re done we will have the beginnings of a game. A user will be able play a single-player game against the AI from start to finish. Then we will go back and implement a second pass on AI and add key defensive features like (knocking the ball down, brutal timed hits, better angle of attack, and of course, killing the opponent). We also have a first pass on deaths and using reserve players (taking them off the bench, substituting them for starters). This was delivered to me late Tuesday night and it’s working very well. Now we need to add our death animations, dismemberment, and visual effects. Yes, you heard right – DISMEMBERMENT!!!
