Early on during the development of 1D Sports I split the events into 3 or 4 different groups depending on how they are played.
The reason there are so many screenshots of the running events in circulation and relatively few of the other events is that in the current branch (the game was rebuilt three times in typical Distorted Poetry fashion) those are the family of events that are most finished. They are all examples of synchronous events.
In a synchronous event all the action takes place at the same time. If the game has the maximum of three players involved then three players are all playing at the same time. These events have been created to foster the sort of competitive environment that existed in the 8 bit days when 2, 3 or even 4 players could be gathered around a single keyboard at the same time. If you ever played a 2 player game on keyboard on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum you'll know the feeling and the feeling playing 1D sports on an iPad is exactly the same. The feeling of gathering around the same device and space being at a premium is something nostalgic that we wanted to enjoy again.
In asynchronous events the players take turns to control the action. This fosters a different style of competitive behaviour in multiplayer one of trash talk and perfectly timed nudges. Back in the golden age of arcade games and right up to the current day in pinball this has been a way people have played multiplayer games. Again the modern multiplayer game is often synchronous and played with people remotely and we wanted to enjoy the experience of playing games together again something that is lost outside the 'party game' environment.
There are two types of asynchronous event. Those that have multiple rounds and those that have a single round. In the vast majority of multi-round asynchronous events there will be 3 chances to hit a set qualifying target but there exists another type of asynchronous event that will only allow a single chance to reach the qualifying grade. These are generally events that are longer in duration such as target shooting or archery. In the archery event for example, at least in the current build, an exceptional player can play for a long time because the even continues until the player misses. The difficulty ramps up pretty quickly so not many people will be able to play for more than 20 or 30seconds (by which time they will have long passed the qualifying mark) but even that is a long time when waiting for your turn at the controls so multiplying that by three would be horrendous.
There is a third type of event that will only be used once in the first release of 1D Sports and that is the round robin setup. In this every player competes head to head against every other player one on one and a league table of results decides the placings. In 1D Sports this is used in the final event of the game, Tug'o'War but features in several potential add-on events that will be included in new game types in later builds of the game.
I'm not one for going all 'Computer Science' and unnecessary when it comes to real world design but understanding the problems you face and classifying the solutions is the first step in any solid design.
Very few of the blogs about 1D Sports will be about the technical issues and most will be about the games design since it's the concept of 1D Sports and why it should interest gamers that is of more importance but sometimes the technical and the creative go hand in hand and have to be discussed together.
