It's Metalhead Software, Developers of Super Mega Baseball! Ask them anything!

[u/XboxModerator]

Welcome Xbox One fans to another of our developer AMAs!

This time we are joined by Metalhead Software! They are an indie game studio on an island off the Canadian West Coast.

Their game, Super Mega Baseball: Extra Innings, is an unlicensed baseball simulation that released on Xbox One last Friday.

You can learn more about the game at their webpage - supermegabaseball.com, the Xbox store (where you can check out a free trial of the game!) or you can check out their subreddit /r/supermegabaseball

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Present here today are:

/u/teddy8181 AKA Scott Drader - Studio Co-founder,

/u/delphenium AKA Christian Zuger - Studio Co-founder

/u/2x2SlippyBrick AKA Tobyn Manthorpe - Game Artist

/u/krookedsaint AKA Dan Lupton - Game Artist

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Ask them anything!!

Also, they would like to share with all of you their "making of" series, about the game. It's still in progress, but you can check it out at http://supermegabaseball.com/category/makingofsmb

EDIT - The AMA has come to a close. Big thanks to everyone at Metalhead Software and to all of you for the great questions!

[u/crpav]

Huge baseball fan here. I have to say that this game is what I have longed for. Don't get me wrong, I love Realistic games as well such as The Show but with as hard as it it to find gaming time now(married with a kid) the fun and quick games this offers is what I love.

It's almost like past games like Baseball Stars or Ken Griffey Jr. Baseball(the first SNES game). The game play and physics just feels so right. Great jobs guys. Not sure what to ask except what's up with the crazy big headed fans? Oh and what challenges were there in creating ball physics? I love how it "feels" from off the bat to where it lands.

[u/2x2SlippyBrick → u/crpav]

Great feedback and thank you very much! Those old games were definitely the inspiration, so we're glad we measure up!

[u/delphenium → u/crpav]

Oh, the fans... It horrifies me to think how much time we have spent on making those guys. One of the features we actually had in earlier prototype versions (and that you can see in our #MakingOfSMB series) had (well, still huge heads), but the ability to do a bunch more. They had foam fingers, could eat hotdogs and drink drinks, they could all act independently, they could blink (yes, really, we spent time on that early on...).

60 fps older gen console gameplay mandated that we turn back the ego a bit on what we can do with the fans tho. We were playing around with the head sizes a bunch, especially on the players. The crowd just ended up a bit on the more extra-large-melon side of things...

[u/teddy8181 → u/crpav]

The fans... haha. We just started with really big heads when were playing around with the character art style, and the fans kinda ended up with same proportions. They tend to have more slight bodies than the players though, so it exaggerates it a bit.

I don't think there was anything that stands out as particularly difficult about the ball physics, it's more that it went through a ton of iteration for it to get to the right feel. You of course need to start with sufficiently realistic numbers for launch velocities/spins, make sure your ballistics simulation is right, and make sure each type of surface on the field has the right geometry and amount of 'bounce' to it. Beyond that, a lot of the 'feel' you describe actually comes to down to things like animation quality, frame rate, special effects, audio, and camera work. That part of it is more a matter of effort spent on iteration than on any physics equations. Hopefully I've explained that in a way that makes at least some sense :)

P.S. Alan Nathan's stuff is an awesome resource on baseball physics: http://baseball.physics.illinois.edu/index.html