Current State: The Speed minigame includes fair/foul balls, despite no batter or animation. The Speed minigame also does not allow you to return to the main menu after completing a game. It would also be nice to have a catcher's glove for the minigame, although this does add to the challenge (perhaps make this an option the user can toggle?). I noticed the emphatic ball and strike call still doesn't seem to do much, is it just me? I think maybe there should be a small point boost for a correct emphatic call (10-20%), but a large point loss (30-50%) for an incorrect emphatic call. Love the check swings and foul balls, so awesome implementation of that feature. Would be cool to have the check swing feature something the batter challenges like another commenter said. Would also be nice to view your final pitch breakdown against each team, so that I can see how I expanded the strike zone for my team and tightened it up for the other team.
Future Plans: Not sure what the full game plans are, but it would be cool to have different teams offer you different rewards (bribes, money, XP, etc.) for calling the game a certain way. Some examples I can think of are 1. # of strikeouts in a game, 2. blocked challenges, or 3 # of wrong calls in their favor. I could see this being implemented as a message from a coach of one of the teams prior to the game, offering you a mini-goal that you can achieve regardless of who wins. This way, you can still have the team you want win while still making the other coach happy. And then maybe you can have an "opposing coach trust meter" that changes after each game based on how your calls are towards them, and if it gets too low, you may be investigated by the league. Also, we're all looking forward to doubles, triples, and home runs. I think the transparency aspect is fun as far as hit chance goes, so it would be cool to either be able to see the chances of different hits, or maybe even have this unlockable as you progress your umpire skills. For example, a new umpire would not be able to see the hit chances, but you could unlock different umpiring features as you go, such as the strike zone box displays and player (both home and away could be unlockable) quality stats. Once again, these are just some ideas to keep your creative juices flowing!
jg11z
Recent community posts
Disclaimer: I've probably put a dozen or more hours playing this game so consider me your #1 beta tester lol. I truly enjoy playing your game and I want to see it be successful!
I get all of the comments that talk about making batters swing and all that, which I suspect may be in the works, albeit still far out. Thus, I intend to focus more on QoL and similar smaller-scale improvements that probably are a bit less energy intensive to fix.
- Umpire Range-of-Motion: with the new right-handed batters added, it would be nice to be able to move the umpire to the left side of the plate. I'm not sure what the long-term vision is for umpire positioning, but currently, the umpire motion travels on a fixed line, which works, but I could totally see it being done two-dimensionally where there is some defined plane the umpire is allowed to travel within to allow the player to reach their preferred line-of-sight. This plane could even flip/mirror itself for left and right-handed batters if it ends up asymmetrical.
- Streak Tracker: while the streak multiplier maxes out at 3x (which I think is fine btw, kudos to the points system which isn't too difficult), it would be cool to see real-time what the current correct call streak is, and maybe at the end (or even real-time) have an added metric for longest streak.
- Strike 3 Pitch Location: on strike 3 calls (and I'm assuming ball 4 calls), the pitch location flashes for only a moment, so players aren't able to see where the pitch was before the next batter steps into the box. I'd like to be able to see how close the pitch is when I ring up a batter.
- Pitch Challenge Clarification: on more than one occasion, I've called a pitch a strike, and the pitch was challenged. The replay showed a one-pixel overlap between the baseball and the white border of the strike zone. In previous versions of this game, I seem to recall this same scenario being called a strike, so I'd recommend you look into that and maybe provide a rules section with clarification on what constitutes a ball or strike.
- Team Choice: it would be cool to select which team you want to help win prior to starting a game. I suspect you're already working on something like this or have already considered it.
-Difficulty Setting: I didn't notice much of a difference between the two difficulty settings, but I didn't see you really mention it in the v9 update log so I'm just guessing you haven't gotten too deep into it yet.
Thanks again for your support of this project, and feel free to write me back if you had any questions about this feedback!