From left to right; Darren Ferdinando, Jeremy Byrne, Hugo Lawrence, Timothy Best, Robert Spencer, Scott Kerr, Steven Hilton, Petr Cervenka, David Keep, Brendan Ragan, Karthik Bayya.
For Cricket we wanted both “tactical” and “easy-to-use”, but above all we wanted to capture the slash and parry of being at the crease under the big-game lights. We wanted that flow; we wanted TV-slick. We wanted modern. That meant 3D graphics, that meant a certain look, and it meant we couldn't plaster the screen with buttons, gauges, sliding indicators or Ragdoll Kung-Fu limb control. In different games all of those things have their place, but it didn't feel right for us.
You're designing a game. Where do you start? If you said “gameplay” you've just warmed my designy-heart, but you still get a hearty, “not so fast, buckaroo”. Even if your game is pure gameplay, and abstracted to Timbuktu and back like Tetris, Trism or Bejewelled, you still need to have a guiding principle. You want to have something that you're looking to capture, a feel, a rush a challenge. If you don't work that out early on, you tend to get a weird Frankengame where the freaky-big arm punches the opposite leg as it walks.
It's good to see so many people downloading and enjoying the Kolkata ground, so I thought I would share a picture that shows a little of how it's constructed; on the left is the ground as it appears in the game and on the right is the wireframe showing the geometry that I created. It looks a lot better with the textures on it.
