Inside the Park Baseball
Here are the first official screenshots of Inside the Park Baseball, a new approach to sports gaming. The game will combine traditional role-playing elements with a great baseball simulation engine, the same one used in our award-winning Out of the Park Baseball. This combination is guaranteed to create an incredibly enjoyable game while presenting you with the challenge of guiding your character from the amateur draft to a possible Hall of Fame baseball career.
The set of screenshots included in this newsletter is taken from the character creation module, the initial step when you begin your career as a baseball player. Character creation is one of the most important parts of Inside the Park Baseball. How you shape your character at the beginning of the game will dramatically affect the evolution of your fantasy world. Even the smallest adjustment to a single rating can cause two otherwise similar players to proceed down very different career paths.
Note that while most players will want to create their character from scratch, you will also be able to load some of ITP's pre-made player templates, or, import other users' player templates from the Internet.
Create Character Screen:
Step one in creating your character requires you to enter your personal data, select your desired player type (hitter or pitcher) along with a difficulty level and determine at which point you wish to start your career (college or highschool player). Depending on the difficulty level, you spend a certain amount of role-playing points and skill points to shape your on-screen persona. RPG points can be distributed to the following RPG attributes:
Strength - Indicates your character's basic physical power. This ability is generally important for all ballplayers, but is especially important for power hitters and power pitchers, and a bit less so for finesse pitchers and utility players.
Intelligence - Determines how well and how quickly your character learns and reasons. Players with high intelligence ratings improve faster in the mental aspects of the game, and have a better learning success rate when reading books that contain valuable lessons. This trait is more important for pitchers than for slugging first basemen, though it can be a benefit to all, of course.
Dexterity - Measures hand-eye coordination, agility, reflexes, and balance. This ability is particularly important for pitchers, and "skill" position players (shortstop, centerfield, etc.). Players with high dexterity values are viewed as graceful, gifted athletes, capable of making sensational plays in the field.
Constitution - This rating reflects your character's health and stamina. Players with high constitution ratings can perform at peak levels without fatiguing as much as lower rated players. Constitution also affect's the player's ability to avoid injuries.
Charisma - Measures your character's force of personality, persuasiveness, personal magnetism, ability to lead and physical attractiveness. Players with high charisma will benefit during contract negotiations, will likely receive more playing time over similarly skilled (but less charismatic) players.
Luck - Making it as a ballplayer requires a little bit of good fortune. Sometimes, it pays to be in the right place at the right time.
Once you finished the first step, it's time to move to the second one and spend some skill points.
Skill Potential:
Skill points are determined by your choice of the difficulty level at which you choose to play. When you chose 'Easy' difficulty, you'll be allotted 110 points to spend at a 'Normal' setting, 90 points are available for distribution; and at a 'Hard' difficulty setting, you'll have just 70 points with which to play. The categories in which you spend those skill points will differ, depending upon whether you're working on a hitter or pitcher. Here is an example of how skill points might be distributed for a hitter in normal mode and a pitcher in hard mode.
For hitters, skill categories consist of contact hitting, homerun power, gap power, eye/patience, defensive skills, running speed and stealing bases ability. Pitchers can allocate skill points to control, stuff, velocity, poise, stamina, defense, hitting and a variety of pitches.
How many skill points you are allowed to allocate to a certain category is influenced by your RPG abilities. For example, you cannot have a high homerun power rating when you have no strength. Pitching stamina is directly related to your Constitution Rating when determining how much this particular category can be improved. Furthermore, without a certain level of intelligence you cannot expect to learn more than two pitches, or have a great base stealing rating as a hitter.
Inventory:
Once you have allocated your skill points, the next step is to equip your character with the useful baseball items. ITP features over 300 different items, including bats, batting gloves, gloves, shoes and instructional books. All items with the exception of books immediately boost your skills when used. Some items have disadvantages though; for example bats that increase your power but take away from your ability to make contact. It will be up to you to determine the give and take value of each item prior to making your choices.
Books, as mentioned, are more important for pitchers than for hitters. With books you can learn more pitches, increase your current control or stuff, or simply learn how to read the hitters weaknesses better, resulting in a better poise rating. However, not every book you purchase and read is guaranteed to give you a boost in ratings. This depends on your intelligence and luck, as well as the existing overall ratings. On rare occasions and if you're lucky, you may find a book that increases your hitting skills as well, like the famous book "The Art of Hitting".
Great items don't come cheaply though, regardless of what position you play, so think before you spend your hard earned money on a bat in the sports store or on bBay.
More information on the game, as well as additional screenshots, will be provided when the game nears completion. ITP will be released at the end of 2003 (or earlier) for a price of $19.95!
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