What Maximum-Football Could Have Been (Full Version)

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DirkGildun -> What Maximum-Football Could Have Been (4/21/2009 4:18:28 PM)

I've only been aware of Maximum-Football since just before it was initially released in 2006, so please bear with me as I ramble a bit about how MF could have been the perfect game for me if it had been designed a little differently (or, maybe, not changed from its original design).

Way back in the early to mid '70's. my buddies and I used to play a game called NFL Strategy by Tudor Games. Initially, it had 36 offensive plays, 12 defenses, and the appropriate special teams plays. It was considered state-of-the-art at that time.

We set up a 6-team league and played 3 14-game seasons a year for about 5-6 years. Since the game didn't have individual player identities, we pooled all of our Topps football cards and conducted drafts, trades, and free agent signings and releases with the cards. Obviously, the player cards had no impact on the results of our games, but it gave each of our teams its own identity, and gave us a lot of discussion points ("Wanna trade Mercury Morris for O. J. Simpson?" "Nah, Morris had a lot more yards last season.").

The games themselves, given the limited number of plays, turned into pure exercises of strategy, percentages, and what we knew about each other (once we eliminated the use of the patented ball and springs method of play result determination -- too easy for a couple of my buddies to cheat with [:@]).

Obviously, the number of seasons that the 6 of us played together shows how much we enjoyed ourselves.

That all being said, here's how Maximum-Football would have been perfect for us 30-something years later if it had these features:

-- No individual player identities/skills, other than names perhaps. All players created equal.
-- Stadiums of each type -- outdoor grass field, outdoor artificial field, indoor artificial field -- with associated possible weather conditions (that would affect play).
-- A set of default offense, defense, and special teams plays, playbooks, and gameplans (that actually work well).
-- The ability to create new plays, playbooks, and game plans (with builtin AI buster restrictions).
-- A League Generator/Editor.
-- A Schedule Generator/Editor.
-- A Stats Database and Report Generator.
-- Gameplay graphics would be relatively unimportant. X's and O's would be fine as long they accurately represented the actions of the offense and defense.

A game that had the above features would emphasize the coaching aspect of football on the field, not the management aspect of it off the field.

Maximum-Football came close in a lot of ways, but missed by a mile in others.



donkuchi19 -> RE: What Maximum-Football Could Have Been (4/22/2009 1:22:59 AM)

I actually made a computer version of NFL Strategy on my old Commodore 64. I added player names (for RB, WR, TE, and QB). I put in a very basic AI where the teams would pass more often on 3rd and Long and stuff like that. (I used simple variables and random numbers. I put the running plays numbered 1-20 (or however many there were since I don't remember) and pass plays later. On short yardage plays, there was a number subtracted from the random # which made it more likely there would be a running play and the opposite on longer plays)

I had a football field on the screen with the endzones the team colors and a scoreboard above it where the play by play would be given. I had the cards put into a database and you picked your play, the computer picked its and then generated a random number from 1-100 that indicated which box would be used. It also tracked which side of the field the ball was on (the red, blue, and black parts of the cards). It then generated team stats and individual stats that you could print on my old okidata printer.

That was my most impressive bit of programming in High School.



DirkGildun -> RE: What Maximum-Football Could Have Been (4/22/2009 1:12:05 PM)

Wow, I did basically the same thing back in the '80's with my C64, after I moved away from my hometown and didn't know anyone that was interested in playing NFL Strategy (I was on my 4th version of the game by that time).

I didn't go to anywhere near the level of detail that you did, however. My C64 Basic program just randomly picked an offensive play or defense (depending on the key I pressed), randomly gave me the result box (from the 40%, 25%, 20%, 10%, and 5% windows -- with a 2.5% chance for a penalty), and kept the game time for me.

Since I was (and still am) a mainframe computer application developer, I really didn't want to spend all my free time coding also. [;)]



Marauders -> RE: What Maximum-Football Could Have Been (4/22/2009 5:07:47 PM)

quote:

-- No individual player identities/skills, other than names perhaps. All players created equal.


I disagree with that one.  For many leagues, fictional players can develop fictional lives of their own.  It's nice to give players personality, and one is much more able to do so if players have differing stats. 

One problem with Maximum Football is that such a small percentage of the skill attributes numbers can actually be used.  This was a concern of mine long ago, as I questioned David about the range in each attribute hat would be required for the game to work well.

If all quarterbacks have to have a minimum 80 PSA, then that really only allows 20 points of the attribute to make a difference between QB's.  Showing a 100 point range in the game really is meaningless, because the game will not play well under the minimum.  Nevertheless, one can use JD's utility to set all players of any position to near or same attributes if that is what one would like.

quote:

-- Stadiums of each type -- outdoor grass field, outdoor artificial field, indoor artificial field -- with associated possible weather conditions (that would affect play).


As a Minnesota Vikings fan, I can honestly state that weather conditions have won or lost many games in football.  Not having wind conditions that affect gameplay is an omission that should have been adressed.  It was something that both the community and the beta team brought up from time to time.

quote:

-- A set of default offense, defense, and special teams plays, playbooks, and gameplans (that actually work well).


In my opinion, good playbooks and gameplans are critical to the success or failure of any computer football game.  Just having a bunch of nonrelated plays thrown together in playbooks is not good enough.  This is an area that I lobbied hard to correct for Maximum Football, but obviously, it was not a high priority development concern. It is an area where being good enough isn't really good enough and is a gameplan for a disaster.

quote:

-- The ability to create new plays, playbooks, and game plans (with builtin AI buster restrictions).


Maximum Football certainly has one of the best play creation tools ever released for a computer football game.

quote:

-- A League Generator/Editor.


Maximum Football has that.  It is much better than the FBro and Madden league tools.  One problem is that it is open ended, so game owners would try to create leagues with odd numbered teams that didn't match the schedule length and then complain about it.  If the math doesn't work, there isn't much the game can do about it.

quote:

-- A Schedule Generator/Editor.


I tried to have this addressed, but schedule generation is not as simple as one would believe.  There are many variables.  That stated, myself and others were willing to provide several schedule types if the schedule tool had supported saving and loading of schedule templates.

quote:

-- A Stats Database and Report Generator.


The database is there, but it is not easy to use, and it is missing a few stats areas.  The reports generator isn't where many computer football games are now.  That's too bad, because it would be nice to see leagues show off more of what the game can do, but one can see that online leagues like Dreamteams's Metro Football League do display many stats for fans keeping up on records, scores, and statistics.

quote:

-- Gameplay graphics would be relatively unimportant. X's and O's would be fine as long they accurately represented the actions of the offense and defense.


That used to be fine, but team colors, uniforms, stadium graphics, and 3D play can add so much to the immersion into the game.  There is no reason not to add them into any game that actually shows the plays rather than just posts text of the plays.

quote:

Since I was (and still am) a mainframe computer application developer, I really didn't want to spend all my free time coding also. [;)]


Did you get a chance to play Head Coach on UNIX?  It became Professional Football Simulation on the Amiga.




DirkGildun -> RE: What Maximum-Football Could Have Been (4/22/2009 6:20:07 PM)


quote:

ORIGINAL: Marauders

Did you get a chance to play Head Coach on UNIX?  It became Professional Football Simulation on the Amiga.


Not that I recall. I played a few crappy football games on the Commodore 64, and the main reason I bought a 386 PC in 1990 was to play "NFL Challenge" by XOR Games (hence my tolerance for animated X's and O's [:D]).

I gave up my C64-aided "NFL Strategy" playing for "NFL Challenge", which I finally gave up to play FPS Football (from the 2nd version up to the 1998 version).



Old Coach -> RE: What Maximum-Football Could Have Been (4/22/2009 11:35:07 PM)

I have to throw my 2 cents worth in here. I agree with Marauders' accessment of MaxFB's development. I was on the beta team from the beginning in 2003 and I saw the game go through many changes. My main area of tesing was with the PDS and the effect of player ratings on game play. For me, the ratings assigned by the game engine are way off in SPD and AGI.

I too had a C-64 and I had the original Madden game and also a game called Pure Stats Football. Madden had great play editor. The main drawback was that gameplay was slow due to the need to access data from the floppy drive on almost every play. The Pure Stats Football game engine was based upon actual stats and a player rating system similar to that of the APBA board game. Pure Stats could be played as a text game or with animations. It had a team creation disk that could be purchased separately. As to board games, I played APBA from 1964 on up through the late 80's My first season set of cards for the game was based on the 1963 NFL season. Being a huge Y.A. Tittle fan, I played many games with the New York Giants. Each year I bought the new season card set up until about 1978 or so. I eventually concentrated on making college teams for the game and continued to play APBA until the game was destroyed in a fire at a friend's house.

Old Coach



garysorrell -> RE: What Maximum-Football Could Have Been (4/23/2009 12:20:28 AM)

Well, to chime in also, I think that had MaxFB shipped with a set of Hack style playbooks, it would have made a world of difference. Also, add the onside kick and beef up the late game AI. If a team is down by 6 with a few seconds to go, the AI should force the freakin team to go for it...not kick a FG or run a random run up the middle.
I appreciate the power we were given in the PDS, but there is no ability to dictate special teams behavior for a team. I cant tell you how many games I have seen where a team could have kicked a FG to end a half, or go for it on 4th when down, but they dont. Usually time just runs out.

I always wondered why we heard so much about how this or that can be controlled via the situations in a playbook, yet we werent really given a set of playbooks that we could use as example. I learned most of what I do know from digging into Hacks books.

My favorite football game for years was Microleague Coaches Challenge, and Super Sunday....primitive by todays standards, but great fun. And heck yea, I kept stats.



DirkGildun -> RE: What Maximum-Football Could Have Been (4/23/2009 2:17:59 PM)

Two of the things we did with our "NFL Strategy" league was manually keep play-by-play logs (using a different colored pen for each team, with a huge set of league-approved abbreviations and notations, etc.), then create boxscores from the logs like we would see in the newspaper after an NFL weekend.



Scott_WAR -> RE: What Maximum-Football Could Have Been (4/23/2009 3:41:22 PM)

I just hope that one day a developer will "get it" and create a more strategy oriented football game. Thereare a few games to look at in the past to see what worked and what didnt, and to see what people wanted,...and what they didnt.  There is a reason certain games were so popular...........they gave the players what they wanted,...instead of what the devs wanted.

This game was really kind of doomed to begin with. The custom rules were just too broad, and actually had the opposite effect of their intention. While they allowed different rulesets, they limited what could be done within each ruleset. For example,...part of the AI's problem is undoubtedly the problem of making an AI that can play within custom rules and different rulesets. If whats most popular,..american football, had been stuck with it could have made a huge difference.

You can many things with mediocre results,...or you can stick  to one thing and do it well.



Tullius -> RE: What Maximum-Football Could Have Been (4/23/2009 8:58:44 PM)

quote:

There is a reason certain games were so popular...........they gave the players what they wanted,...instead of what the devs wanted.


But developer needs a motiviation and he will develop his game.

The real problem is imo that "a" developer can not create a super game that all people want because he has simply not the knowledge of football and programming that is required to create. So all programms are more or less one sided, they have some strong aspects and then glaring holes.

MF could have been the synthesis but David Winter is more an arcade game and i think he has absoltely no experience in playing a football game as career game so he has never really realized what a career game is and that's why only a strange view. He often looked to FPS because it was so praised but the most people did not said him that FPS management AI was simply crap and in some aspects MF is here much better. The team profile concept is much better than the FPS solution and i hated these situations when in FPS a CB were used as DT and the CB sometimes much stronger only because the AI had only 4 DL on the roster.

But back to main problem. As DW had no real vision of a career mode and so no real concept but had to added one the logical result was an awkward construct. I see that problem very clearly as i program at the moment such a career mode for my league (because i want a game which plays my way). Before you write the first line of code you need a clear idea what you want and how you will do it or you do things by halves which means: changing already existing code (that can cause a series of new bugs and many other problems), different approaches, much more work and chaos. In this case you will soon detect that some code is now not more useful because the problems are much more complex. Your whole system will collapse. But when you have a clear plan you can already consider features which should be later implemented.

The hidden charm of MF is that you can here do so much yourself. After i allocated player to all teams i have played already a season in a test league. All stats are properly saved. I could even add some defensive team stats like (various) yards allowed and so on. The stats are collected on a weekly bases. Now i am in the offseason and working on a player development algorithm.

The only "disadvantage" is that the original league file can only be used for playing the games and all others will be done outside. But it shows it is possible to build a complete simulation around MF.



Old Coach -> RE: What Maximum-Football Could Have Been (4/24/2009 10:39:00 AM)

David's original vision for MaxFB was that it was to be a game where you created your league, team rosters, uniforms, playbooks and then just sat down and played some football. Career mode and simming was not part of the plan. If David had been able to market the game on his own, that's what it would have been. Admittedly, that concept would have catered to a limited group, but I think as a pure football game, it could have been a stronger product. I'm a former high school football coach and this game is a close as I can get to coaching again without having to get hot and sweatty on an August afternoon.

Old Coach



Mrgravyard50 -> RE: What Maximum-Football Could Have Been (4/24/2009 12:46:58 PM)

So I guess that FB Pro 98 even after 11 years is Still the Best True Football game..?



Marauders -> RE: What Maximum-Football Could Have Been (4/24/2009 8:29:17 PM)

quote:

Old Coach stated: David's original vision for MaxFB was that it was to be a game where you created your league, team rosters, uniforms, playbooks and then just sat down and played some football. Career mode and simming was not part of the plan.


Unless one doesn't have a job or children, having a league without the ability to sim league games is unrealistic.  No one I know can sit down and play-out eight, ten, or sixteen games each week.

As far as career mode goes, I expressed to David on the old Wintervalley board that making sure that all league database files were capable of handling career mode even if the game didn't have it to begin with.  David publicly chastized me for trying to be a developer even way back then.  When Matrix Games picked up Maximum-Football, and the Career mode was added, the database files had to be changed, and that wasted time.

quote:

If David had been able to market the game on his own, that's what it would have been. Admittedly, that concept would have catered to a limited group, but I think as a pure football game, it could have been a stronger product.


David's original vision still had depth charts that were superficial, many stats recorded incorrectly, and playbooks that were not ready for prime time.  None of that changed until the beta team and community expressed concerns about the viability of Maximum Football as any kind of simulation of football.  If David had allowed more input from the start, so much more could have been done correctly from the get go which would have allowed the game to progress more quickly and more cleanly.

quote:

I'm a former high school football coach and this game is a close as I can get to coaching again without having to get hot and sweatty on an August afternoon.


I agree, but Maximum Football 2.2 is a much better game than what was released, and it could have been even better had not the original vision got in the way of pragmatic steps toward advancing the game.  That stated, David did a heck of a lot of work to get 2.2 to where it is - more than many people give him credit for.  It's just too bad it took so much pushing, prodding, and patches to get it there.

quote:

Mrgravyard50 asked: So I guess that FB Pro 98 even after 11 years is Still the Best True Football game..?


One can do much more with Maximum Football than one could with stock FBPro'98 (no Sundby or Gelat tools).



Marauders -> RE: What Maximum-Football Could Have Been (5/5/2009 6:19:05 PM)

quote:

Tullius stated:

The real problem is imo that "a" developer can not create a super game that all people want because he has simply not the knowledge of football and programming that is required to create. So all programs are more or less one sided, they have some strong aspects and then glaring holes.


I agree. A developer must know what can be done, and a developer must know what the team can get done in the time allowed. In this case, David really didn't have a team to work with many items that the game needed early on. Because of this, he had to back track and recode, which cost a lot of time. He also started to resent the beta team and community members for bringing up items that he didn't originally think essential to the game.

quote:

MF could have been the synthesis but David Winter is more an arcade game and i think he has absoltely no experience in playing a football game as career game so he has never really realized what a career game is and that's why only a strange view. He often looked to FPS because it was so praised but the most people did not said him that FPS management AI was simply crap and in some aspects MF is here much better. The team profile concept is much better than the FPS solution and i hated these situations when in FPS a CB were used as DT and the CB sometimes much stronger only because the AI had only 4 DL on the roster.


FBPro was a logical choice, because it was set up in a way to make a similar VB program. The training camp was simple to figure out how things were done. It's too bad I had not been in beta back then, as there were some problems that could have been overcome in the design phase of Maximum Football.

I agree that FBPro has some AI problems with drafts, rosters, and trades that David would have been well to avoid. He did try to avoid some of them with the team profiles, but that caused some other problems. We never really got to get that fixed after the 2.0 roster changes. It was 90% right, so not getting it right was like eating ice cream with salt.

quote:

But back to main problem. As DW had no real vision of a career mode and so no real concept but had to added one the logical result was an awkward construct. I see that problem very clearly as i program at the moment such a career mode for my league (because i want a game which plays my way). Before you write the first line of code you need a clear idea what you want and how you will do it or you do things by halves which means: changing already existing code (that can cause a series of new bugs and many other problems), different approaches, much more work and chaos. In this case you will soon detect that some code is now not more useful because the problems are much more complex. Your whole system will collapse. But when you have a clear plan you can already consider features which should be later implemented.


That is well put. I tried so hard to get that point across well before Matrix Games even looked at Maximum Football. I'd like to pull David's public rant from the Wintervalley board about me trying to make sure the database files were set up for career mode. It was his game, and he wasn't going to take advice from someone else. It was short sighted.

As I have stated here and on Mykal's board, David had a very good group of dedicated football and game people to help him out with this project, and he didn't use those resources to the game's best advantage. Even now, with 3.0, he is using very little of what could be a very good development crew. I understand the IP issues, but those can be covered with a few contracts.

quote:

The hidden charm of MF is that you can here do so much yourself. After i allocated player to all teams i have played already a season in a test league. All stats are properly saved. I could even add some defensive team stats like (various) yards allowed and so on. The stats are collected on a weekly bases. Now i am in the offseason and working on a player development algorithm.


Yes, the game allows a lot to be done. I would have liked much more to be done for a better out of the box presentation, but the game is pretty good for those willing to work with it.



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