Continuing with my chariot racing obsession, I have been looking at a bunch of racing games to give me some ideas. I stumbled across a interesting genre of games called "replay games." Researching further, these games are typically solo sport game simulations based on actual player or horse statistics.
I looked specifically at two of Terry Goodchild's games: "Metric Mile" and the "Sport of Kings." Both of these games are not strictly replay games, and thus are tailored for having multiple players interact together.
The way Terry has designed these games is truly brillant from what I have read (I recently just ordered these games and will soon be playing them).
Anyway, from what I can gather of the rules, it appears that in both games the sprinter or the horse has running modes that use up a finite amount of stamina each sprinter or horse is given. Obviously, the faster mode you go, the more stamina is used up. This is a gross simplicfication with many factors left out, but this gives an idea of the chief mechanic of the games.
For the "Metric Mile", there is five modes from "ease off" to "sprint" while the "Sport of Kings" has only "normal" and "under pressure" modes. In both cases, it sounds as if you go to the highest mode (under pressure or sprint), you must stay in that mode until you run out of stamina.
This rule then encourages players, if they decide to go at the fastest mode, to only do so towards the end of the game (if you do it too soon you are guaranteed to run out of stamina and become exhausted as you must stay in the fastest mode until you run out of stamina).
Obviously this lends to interesting decisions of if you should go the fastest mode and if you decide to do so then when; you've got only one opportunity to do so.
Something irks me a little bit about this entire idea from a realism and game design standpoint. I don't know about athletes, but with horses if you go at their ultimate max speed, they can only maintain that speed for three furlongs at the very most. If you examine the throughbred world records and plot the distance versus time of a race for all recorded distances, you have an almost linear relationship, except for the fact that there is a big drop in feet per second (fps) from 3 furlongs to 3.5 furlongs (3 fps). Note I am making the assumption that in both races, all the horses are going at a sprint pace right from the beginning of the race.
It appears that with Goodchild's design, you may opt to sprint to begin with. If you did so, you would travel a much further relative distance to three furlongs before being tired. In horse races, different horses break at different parts of the race, sometimes going at their top speed, but these durations are short and the horses are not immediately exhausted after going at these speeds.
The problem from a gaming standpoint is why only allow a horse team to sprint towards the end?
To change this would mean that there would have to be a rule change that limits the player to only use this mode once, but only for a certain time or use of stamina.
A solution I've come up with, is to have special "reserve stamina" that can be used for all modes while the "normal" stamina can not be used to sprint. Once a player does go to sprint mode, all of the reserve stamina must be used up. This now limits how long a horse can go and allows the player to sprint at any point in the race.
Sounds good, right? But between my idea and Terry's idea, how can one decide between the two? Must one always playtest to find out, or can one use gaming design principles to decide between the two. My method, I believe, adds a bit of complication for the added bonus of adding extra decisions and realism.
This is my dilemma these days, not just coming up with a mechanic that is simple and seems to work, but being able to analyze the mechanic from a decision/fun design standpoint.
Any input would be appreciated.
--DarkDream
