If you are like me, you are a staunch believer in competition as the mother of innovation. When games have no real challengers, they tend to stagnate no matter how much pressure the dev team puts on itself. See Smackdown vs. Raw or Madden, for example. Quick Hit Football, an upcoming flash game, looks to capitalize on the numerous football fans turned off by Madden's complicated control scheme or uninterested in console gaming in general. Distilling the controls while balancing the depth of a game is no simple task, and Quick Hit, smartly, recruited people with a wealth of experience in gaming to develop its new title. Brandon Justice, Director of Design, and Geoff Scott, Director of Production, recently spoke to me over the phone to explain the basics of Quick Hit Football, the concepts behind it, and how they plan to compete with their console brothers like Madden.
(If you're really like me, you spend most your day at a computer and would be all over a well-executed flash game you could play during lunch. Or when your boss is in a meeting. Or when you have to talk your parents on the phone. Or your girlfriend is yelling at you. You get the idea.)
Hess: What is the main idea behind Quick Hit Football?
Brandon: The big thing for us is that we didn't want to build a cheap flash game where you went in and pushed a couple buttons and some lights flashed. We're really trying to raise the bar on what a flash game is. We look at that platform and there's really tens of millions of users there, really more than any other console on the market. If we can bring the same console level quality to that base and deliver a game that people are really gonna enjoy, then we're gonna hit the mark.
Hess: What are some of the things you did with Quick Hit Football to make it more interactive than other flash games.
Geoff: We've introduced some of the elements of MMOs, where you level up your players and gain skills per position. You'll be able to fire off skills as you play the game. That's the thing that brings persistence to your team and to your players. Our game is simple to get into but has the depth and complexity of MMOs and console games.
Brandon: So the big thing for us with Quick Hit Football is how we can get the 20 million people playing fantasy football, and the 40 million watching football, who aren't the 5-7 million playing Madden because of the technological barrier or something else, how we can get those users to give in to our game. to leverage the knowledge and that passion for the sport of football and to get them to have fun with our game.
Hess: Will Quick Hit Football players be controlling players on the field?
Brandon: It's a coaching game, so you'll be playing from the sidelines and calling plays. That makes our game different, and another thing is that at the end of the game we tally up fantasy points like you would in a typical fantasy football league. Those points convert into what we call Coaching Points, which you can spend to level up your team.
Geoff: As far as gameplay goes, it's more along the lines of a product like Football Manager or Goal Line Blitz or NFL Head Coach, where you're kinda focused on building your team, managing your team, and on game day making the calls to win. But we're taking a much more casual approach than has been done in the past. The average football fan is going to look at an NFL playbook and not know what to do with it. There's a reason NFL quarterbacks get paid so much money. Your average tailgating football fan is like, "I wanna throw a bomb to Plaxico Burress." Our play calling scheme was designed around that thought process. You can pick a key player in the interface, filter down to a subset of plays that include that player. You can filter by distance, and the plays are graded based upon their effectiveness in the given situation. Filtration is really a big focus of our play calling.
Hess: Can you apply coaching points mid-game?
Brandon: No, you'd have to level up before a game. Say we just played and you whooped me, and it was because my offensive line was just getting taken and every time you blitzed I was getting sacked. Well, I'm gonna go in there before my next game and strengthen up my O Line, and make sure I'm putting my points in places where my weaknesses are. Then I'm gonna use those skill points during crucial moments, say 4th and goal. That's really where the strategy comes in.
Hess: How long does a game play out? Is this something someone can play throughout a day at work? Do players have to agree on a time, like you're raiding a dungeon in an MMO?
Geoff: 20 minutes is our standard goal. But we will give you different game modes, like sudden death, quick mode, it's going to be mostly user decided.
Brandon: It's really important that this is a quick, fun, competitive experience, so as we go through beta testing we're gonna figure out what users like best. Looking at games like 2k and some of the EA franchises, they're putting a big focus on community, where you can build a profile and share your team, your record. The thing about those games though, is that you have to have a separate piece of hardware to engage. The cool thing about us is that our community is integrated. The community is the game.
Hess: So there will be leaderboards...
Brandon: Yeah, you'll have recent games, box scores, leaderboards. And that can change any day. This is a live product. If we decide we really need to make a major or minor change, we can push it out within 24 hours if we have to. We will be constantly responding to the community.
Hess: Did you consult with anyone?
Geoff: Recently we had a conversation with Bill Cowher about his philosophy on coaching and team building and it felt like I was in a locker room halfway through. You get a sense of what a coach he is.
Brandon: Every product I've been associated with has had some kind of spokesperson or cover guy, and since we're a coaching sim, he's the perfect guy to be associated with us. the big thing we're trying to get out of Cowher though, is experience and knowledge, and finding different ways to take those tenets that he used to build those solid squads year after year in Pittsburgh, and encourage that same philosophy through gameplay. We asked him how he decided what players he wanted on the team, which players to develop, who needs to be left alone. Cowher has a lot of experience taking quarterbacks and playing them out of position. In that super bowl a couple years ago vs. Seattle, that one quarterback threw a pass to another former quarterback on a fake reverse to seal that game.
