News

December 19, 2006

New Video and Q&A for NBA Street Homecourt

EA has released a new video for NBA Street Homecourt. The video highlights the new Trick Remixer feature in the game. Additionally, the team have released a Q&A with Todd Batty, producer of the game, which can be read below.

Click here to download the new video for NBA Street Homecourt.

NBA Street Homecourt: Trick Remixer Q&A
Todd Batty, Producer

1. What will be the biggest/most noticeable difference between NBA STREET V3 and Homecourt?
With the move to Next-Gen hardware, we wanted to start with a fresh slate and truly rewrite the game from scratch. This actually allowed us to look at all 3 previous versions from the Street series and pick and choose the features that our consumers told us they liked best. At a high level, the raw gameplay/fun of Street V2 seemed to be the consensus favorite, so we actually started with that as our inspiration and added a whole lot of gameplay innovation on top.

2. What is the biggest gameplay innovation in this year’s game?
Our primary focus for NBA Street Homecourt was gameplay, so it should come as no surprise that our biggest innovations are found there. I’m not sure which feature will resonate loudest with consumers, but the Trick Remixer and the new Dunk controls are both very different than anything that has been done before in basketball video games. Neither of these features would have been possible on current-gen hardware, so they really show off the power of the new consoles and hopefully justify the decision to rewrite this game from scratch.

3. How will the Trick Remixer control change the way I play a basketball video game?
For the Trick Remixer, we had a few high-level goals as a design team. First, we wanted consumers to feel like the ball was actually in their hand when they were dribbling. To do this, we realized we needed the basic building-block animations of the system (various crossovers) to be highly responsive. And by highly responsive, we mean that every time the User presses a button they need to get an instantaneous reaction from their player. So when you play the game, you can do something like 5-10 crossovers per second. It really does feel and look incredible, and definitely makes it feel like you are controlling the ball. Secondly, we wanted to create a system that would allow a User to pick up a controller and be instantly rewarded, but that had depth enough for long-term replayability. If you analyze the move tree you will see that the combinations of tricks are endless, so it never feels like you are doing the same trick over and over again like it does when triggering canned animations, yet you can also pick up the basics in a matter of seconds.

Overall, you will be using both trick buttons so often and so rapidly that you will feel a connection to your player and the ball that the auto-dribble in all previous basketball video game titles just never delivered.

4. Can you walk us through the move tree? How can you get so many different moves out of one button?
The basis of the system starts with tapping the [X] button (on XBOX 360). Tapping the button executes a basic crossover. Where it starts to feel instantly different is when you tap the button at different speeds. Depending on how fast you tap, your player will adjust his posture to allow him to do really quick low crossovers, or higher slower crossovers.

Next, we added in the hesitation move. If you hold the button for any length at all, the player starts to go up into a hesitation move with the ball. If you release it before he gets to the top (the whole motion will ultimately feel like a normal button ‘press’), the player will execute a quick, trick crossover such as jumping over the ball, or slipping it behind his head to the other hand.

If you hold the button a beat longer, however, the player will then execute a bigger trick, such as a spin move.

Finally, if you were executing crossovers very quickly and had your player down low to the ground and THEN held the button, his hesitation move will change from an upright, more fundamental hesi to a lower, hand-on-the-ground pose. From the lower hesitation move, there are different tricks that are triggered when you hold the button to the end.

That pretty much exhausted the possibilities of what we felt we could get out of a single button, but we didn’t stop there. In NBA Street Homecourt we use the [LB] and [RB] buttons (XBOX360) to modify all skill moves. For the Trick Remixer, this means being able to cross the ball between your legs or cross the ball behind your back, depending on what button is held while using [X]. Each of those crossovers has yet another move tree associated with it for the User to discover and learn, and the result is that they can ultimately mix up all the tricks however they want.

We also added something else that we have never done before in Street – a second trick button. All of these tricks are characterized by the player putting the ball on the ground and popping it back up to himself in various different ways - even with a Steve Nash soccer-style kick-flip. When you start to combine these moves with your [X] button moves you will really feel the possibilities are endless.

5. What tips can you give me to master the new Trick Remixer?
We have included a Practice Mode in the game this year and we highly recommend spending some time there to get used to the new controls. Because the underlying system is very logical and predictable (there are no randomly triggered animations in the entire Trick Remixer system) it is pretty easy to figure out when you don’t have to worry about defenders. You can also figure out what tricks earn the most trick points, earn a gamebreaker and then practice your Trick Remixer Gamebreaker moves. These are some of the most entertaining animations in the game, and you can literally spend hours in practice mode playing with this feature. The best part is dribbling to the music, which is interactive and changes based on what tricks you do - such as crossovers doing record scratches to the beat.

6. Can every player have the same level of ball handling skill?
One of our key goals for gameplay was ensuring that our players were clearly differentiated from one another, and that we could be the first game to actually make a defensive superstar like Ron Artest a valuable commodity to have on your team. I will speak more to our defensive controls in future Q&A’s, but I can tell you definitively that not everyone is capable of doing all of the tricks in Trick Remixer. We actually have 4 ability levels for various players: Big Men with no handles at all can only do crossovers. A player with mediocre handles can do crossovers and trick crossovers (the ‘press’ move), players with good handles can do all the tricks noted above, and finally a player with a Master Skill in handles can actually also do a subset of the gamebreaker trick package in regular gameplay. This really forces you to select your teammates wisely.