Posts Tagged ‘Baseball’

Well I would be lying if I said this hasn’t been a challenge.  We went through a lot of budget constraints over the past couple of months but I am glad to report that we are back at it!

I am thinking that beta is going to start by the end of this month as the basic game has been completed and I am just working on the user profiles and the social component of the application.   I will be sending out some emails later this month to slowley roll in the folks who signed up for beta.

Bare with us we are almost there!

Well there have been some unfortunate business things that have happened recently that is delaying production on the game.  We are still chugging along but things are moving slower than usual.  I just wanted to submit a quick post to let those of you know that have signed up what was going on.

Also we are keeping a low profile at first and then going to ramp up our advertising later so word of mouth is the only way we are promoting it now.  Feel free to chat it up and let folks know about us and we will get your friends into beta too!

Fresh on the heals of last weeks screen shot release we are announcing beta sign ups. Beta is scheduled to begin with the start of the baseball season and more details will follow. But for now, head on over and sign up!

We have had this for a while but we didn’t want to get everyone excited until we were close to beta. Which I guess that means we are close to beta doesn’t it!

So there it is. It doesn’t look like much right off of the bat and that is by design. This thing needs to be able to load very fast on mobile devices as well as computers. We needed to keep the graphics to a extreme minimum. The one nice thing about this is that the interface will take on the colors of your favorite team. Ours is obviously the Oakland Athletics and it is good that they are beating the Anahiem Angels I mean the Los Angles Angels of Anaheim ahh who the hell knows anymore, we’ll just call them the ducks hows that. Anyways, here in detail is what you are seeing on this screenshot.

The Field Box

This is where all of your choices are displayed. As you can see I picked that a home run would happen as well as a RBI and someone would attempt to steal before the home run was hit. It shows what I scored on the last play as well as the status. The status indicator is key. When a play is happening the play is locked. You make your predictions in between plays, when the play is locked your choice boxes will slide up and hide from you. This way you know it is locked and can’t change your choice. Once the status changes from locked to open it will process your last choice do some theatrics and show you what you scored. The field is there basically to remind you you are watching baseball.

Now some of you might wonder why there is no area for who is at bat, what pitcher is pitching etc. Well the basic assumption of PredictAPlay is that you are watching the game. Hopefully you are paying enough attention to know who is pitching and at bat right? In that case the scoreboard may be redundant as well. We agree… it may go away depending on how big of a hassle it is.

Leader-board

This one is pretty self explanatory but I would like to touch on a couple of things. You can filter the leader board based on a few things. Your friends, your leagues, and everyone. This can keep the game personal so you can play against your friends either at the game or over vast distances. Also this will quickly allow you to filter out SOXFAN5512123, cause frankly… that guy sucks. Ohh and don’t worry your name doesn’t have to be “user1″

At Bat and Bonuses

These are your prediction boxes. You can pick one pick for “At Bat” and as many “bonuses” as you want. When you pick these they will change the field box so that you know what you chose when these boxes hide when the status is locked. We are contemplating adding 1-2 point simple predictions in here as well. Things like Out, Not out, Infield, Outfield predictions this is for those of you who bet on red and black or odd and even on the roulette table, but we want to test what the scores will be like without these “gimmies”

As always please leave your feedback below. Hell I will give away a beta account to anyone who can point out a continuity error in the interface (there are a couple, and SSI employees are exempt since you get accounts anyways you slackers).

Beta Update!
I am planning on putting something up for beta sign ups starting next week so get ready!

So in any game, or life really there is one simple concept. That is the concept of “risk vs reward”. It means exactly what it sounds like but the concept is a little more important than people generally give it credit. It is a trade off between what you could possibly get and what could possibly happen to you. If you buy that new car chicks will dig you more (reward) but your wife might hate the payment and seek some dude with a fancy car (risk).

In games this concept is usually embodied with points or simply death. If you bum rush that room room with a bunch of guys in it you may come out on top like Rambo and be all the more respected by your similarly nerdy counterparts, however if you run in and get shot in the face chances are they will think less of you.

Which brings us to sports where this concept is by far the most prevalent. The suicide squeeze, the home run swing with two strikes etc etc. In order to capture this feeling of reward and the let down of the risk I had to try to find a way to mimic this in predict-a-play. I came up with the concept of bonus scoring. So you during every at bat you will pick a base prediction. This choice is between the possible outcomes of that at bat such as single, double, triple, home run, etc. Each of these choices will have a point value which has been determined by the stats gathered in my previous posting. This in itself has a bit of risk vs reward, but I couldn’t stop there. There are all these secondary things that could happen during an at bat for instance a RBI, stolen base, wild pitch etc. Now these things don’t happen all that often with the exception of RBIs. So there is a large amount of risk vs reward. For the values I decided to make them modifiers instead of just assigning a point value. What this means is that an RBI will give you a 25% bonus lets say on whatever the base prediction was that you picked. Here is an example:

Your picks:
Base: Double (25 pts),
Bonus: RBI (+/- 25%), Error (+/- 100%)

AB Result:
Double and an error (no RBI)

Score:
43.75!!!
Correct double prediction + 25
incorrect RBI prediction -6.25
Correct error prediction + 25

So see what happened there? That is risk vs reward. The total points possible was 56.25 but because of the incorrect prediction it nocked you down some while still rewarding the other correct predictions. That also means had you only picked double and an error and the error didn’t occur then you would have had 0 points so you really have to be careful when you are playing with the bonus predictions.

Status Update
The code is coming along nicely I am starting to work on the administration panel now and will probably have it completed in the next couple of weeks. I still can’t get around having an administrator watch and score the game live due to the lag in feeds from MLB and other sites, but I think I will talk about this in the next blog update. Beta sign ups are right around the corner so make sure to stay tuned and subscribe using the link on the right.