Design Corner: Replay Cricket 001
This is the first post in a series on a cricket game called Replay Cricket that I’ve been designing for the past 12 or so years – yes, you read that right ;-) 12 + years!
Of course, it’s not as bad as it sounds. It’s something I usually only get to work on once a year when we go on holiday to the Far North of Australia. These annual bursts are then followed by a few weeks of effort early in the year when we are back in London and it’s too cold to go outside, or I decide I want to put in a few hours before going to work … and then it’s put back in its box until the following year.
The last lot of work I did on Replay Cricket was a few weeks ago prior to a friend coming out from Australia. We were due to go away for a few days of red wine drinking, touring, and game play in the south of France. So, what better goal than getting a version of the game ready for the trip?
I spend a fair whack of time on it in the weeks preceding the trip and did get it into a playable form and it looked, about a week before my friend arrived, like this:
The problem was it took about 2-3 minutes to bowl a single ball. Doh! So I wheeled out that classic, Strat-o-Matic and took a few teams from the 1920 season away to France and we played that endlessly instead :-)
But back to my game — what I’ve been trying to do, and one of the (many) reasons it has taken so long to finish, is I want to combine the statistical replay accuracy of games like Strat and International Cricket, but I also want the fielding and player placement of Wicketz, Stumpz and Capri Knock Out Cricket.
And, like Stumpz, I really want the real life players to be able to choose line and length, ball type and shot placement (all of which will be influenced by the player’s ability to achieve each of those based on real life stats) … annnd I would like to have ball condition, pitch, weather, umpires, etc have an influence.
Here’s another pic of where I’m at (using the Wicketz / Subbuteo cricketers, the original scoreboard handmade and part of the first 500 copies of Wicketz, and various dice from other games):
So, the long and short of it is that it’s is more long than short right now.
Over time I will post elements of the game as I design it. But I’m currently tossing up the following:
- Do I just publish everything I’ve done so far on this site and offer it up as an Open Source project to anyone who is interested in contributing; or
- Shelve it for a while and concentrate on an uber simple card game I’ve been thinking about just so I can release the game on this site?
More soon.
