Interviews

April 2, 2008

Deep Fried Entertainment's Rob Hawkey on Major League Baseball 2K8’s “Fantasy” Debut
By Louis Bedigian

“When you look at the most successful titles on the DS they tend to be titles that have experimented with new ways of engaging the user.”

On April 7, Major League Baseball 2K8 will be released for one more (final?) platform: Nintendo DS. But this isn’t merely a port or a scaled-down version of the existing franchise. The DS game is an out-of-this-world, out-of-the-league edition, hence the addition of Fantasy All-Stars being affixed to the MLB 2K8 title.

“When you look at the most successful titles on the DS they tend to be titles that have experimented with new ways of engaging the user, rather than titles that rely solely on the strength of a license or established form of gameplay,” said Rob Hawkey, Game Director for Deep Fried Entertainment. “For MLB Fantasy All-Stars, we knew that we needed to make use of the stylus and touchpad to implement pitching and batting in a new way that would evoke the curiosity of the average DS player. We believe that DS owners are more interested in these new mechanics than just seeing the latest port of their favorite brand from other consoles. We were fortunate enough to be given the freedom to experiment and take our ideas as far as we wanted not only by our publisher but also by the MLB association and MLBPA.”

Pitching and other gameplay elements are set to include touch mechanics. Could you go into detail about this?

Rob Hawkey: We spent many days tuning and playing the game to make sure as best we could that the game was accessible to everyone, yet also had enough shelf life to have value for serious gamers. We tried to stick with the “easy to learn, difficult to master” mantra that came out of a game designer’s speech at a GDC or E3 a while back. This was difficult for us, as we were also inventing a new interface to pitching and batting that nobody has done before. So we didn’t have any sort of metrics to compare our gameplay to.

Both pitching and batting will utilize the touch screen to control the gameplay, with the batter dragging the stylus in a semi circle arc across the touch pad in time with the pitch, and with the pitcher drawing various lines toward the plate to deliver specific pitches. It’s an all-new system that we think players are really going to love.

The stylized graphics style is pretty cool. Is this a form of cel-shading?

RH: We wanted to have visual variety and wackiness in our game. Most sport games are made based on realistic stadiums, but for us the style came along with the wacky and cartoony approach we decided on. Having a table top or stomach for a stadium creates an unusual atmosphere in itself. Since we wanted the look to be unique and different for every stadium we had different artists work on different stadiums, so that each artist could bring his/her unique approach to each stadium.

With the characters we did a bit of cel-shading so that they stand out from the backgrounds. Once again we wanted them to be fun in all aspects: fun shapes, a bit of classic and humorous animation, and some fun silly props to add to the overall fantasy and wacky visual approach.

MLB 2K8 Fantasy All-Stars is more of an arcade sports game, but what inspired the player designs? Some of them are quite different from the norm.

RH: When we first started talking with Take 2 about a baseball game on the DS, we emphasized our opinion that a simulation focused sports game would not be as successful as a sports game that focused on a “fun first” mentality. We feel that the gameplay in our games should not suffer the limitations of realism.

Luckily for us we have a team of highly experienced programmers and artists that easily handled the technical limitations of the DS, yet still produced what we feel is a great looking game. Focusing our art and style in a direction that would look great on the DS allowed us to fully concentrate on the game and using the touchpad to do Baseball in a new and fun way. This was another factor in our decision to stray away from the standard simulation versions of sports games on the DS; it’s very difficult to get a player or stadium looking exactly like real life when you only have 4MB of RAM and a small screen.

Thus far we've gotten a glimpse of five or six different stadiums, ranging from a farm to a haunted mansion-type environment. Talk about these, and tell us if there are others we can expect.

RH: The theme for this game was a tour of the Americas. So our stadiums reflect a lot of the North and South American iconic places, for example: Alcatraz with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background, an Aztec temple, and the Arctic North. We also wanted too throw in just crazy wacky stadiums that just appealed to us as fun places to play Baseball, like on a picnic table, or inside someone’s stomach. We had our concept artists generate a bunch of crazy ideas and picked our favorites, hopefully the people that buy our game think they’re as fun as we do.

What features will the online play mode contain?

RH: We support head to head multiplayer over both Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection and DS wireless (local network). Online you will be able to join matches against a random player, or against friends. You can make friendships either by playing a DS wireless match with an opponent and trading friend codes after the game, or by sharing your friend code with someone manually.

In all of the multiplayer modes you can play with any of the MLB teams, and in any of the stadiums you have unlocked in offline play modes. You’ll also be able to go into game sporting any unlocked equipment rewards you’ve earned to make your opponent jealous.

Thank you for your time.