The upcoming Xbox Live Arcade basketball game HoopWorld is nothing if not unique. It's a sports game that isn't exactly a sports game; it's an arcade basketball game that is attempting to bridge a number of disparate genres within its gameplay; and it's powered by the Unreal engine, which is usually reserved for the likes of first-person shooters. In the four years since the game's original conception, HoopWorld has undergone a number of different changes, and bringing those disparate ideas to fruition has been a labor of love for Streamline Studio's Aubrey Hesselgren. In our first HoopWorld designer diary, Hesselgren talks about the game's evolution, its various influences, and the process of bringing the development studio's game to the Xbox Live Arcade service.

Get Some Rest, Bezzy

I'm not sure how this happened, but I'm a lead designer on a next-generation game. I really should be resting for the final month of crunch we have ahead. But I just can't seem to sleep. Every thought I have seems to cascade back toward this mad game: HoopWorld.

Creating an original arcade basketball game for Xbox Live Arcade has been a labor of love for the folks at Streamline Studios.

When I joined Streamline Studios, my original brief was to design an easy-to-play, over-the-top rendering of basketball, based on our Chief Creative Officer, Hector Fernandez's, original concept. It didn't have to be the exact same game. In fact, Hector encouraged me to take the game and "make it your own." Being given a roughly blank canvas is one of the reasons I wanted to join Streamline, even though, at the time, it was composed of only eight people. Things have changed, and now Streamline has grown to around 50 people, working on some major outsourcing projects, as well as this, our first game. The people here are people like me--willing to take a chance to prove themselves in the games industry.

Hector left me to it. I thought about the ways that basketball interested me, and came up with a few things: the spectacular dribbling and dunking, the skillful positioning and team work. But I also came away with a lot of questions: Why are basketball's rules so restrictive? Why can't you double dribble? Why can't you travel with the ball? Why can't you block the net? Why can't you punch people in the face?

There are obvious answers to all these questions, but the root of the cause was that basketball, as a sport, is grounded in reality. These restrictions don't make basketball bad, because we when we play, we accept that we play on top of reality's laws. We can never step outside of them. But a video game can be an abstraction of reality. At most, we use reality as metaphor; we can explain the game using real-world references, and give the game mechanics some kind of systemic, social, and emotional grounding in the existing preconceptions of the player. The big question was, why should we condemn ourselves to the same rules as basketball, when HoopWorld is not implicitly subject to the laws of physics? With this in mind, HoopWorld's gameplay was born out of abstraction. Perhaps it's only fitting that we are using the "Unreal" engine.

The team may be based in notoriously free-spirited Amsterdam, but HoopWorld's design was pieced together using nothing stronger than cola and coffee. I'm guessing that those two evils combined are part of what is keeping me awake right now. But I've another nagging thought, caught somewhere between the two halves of my brain.

"What is HoopWorld?" I ask myself this now, and every other day during development, and the answer is never quite the same. The game has always been hard for me to describe. It's part beat-'em-up, part free running, and part basketball (Basketbrawl? Freestyle?). And it is still basketball, technically speaking. There are baskets, and there are balls. That's the basics covered, right? Right? Unfortunately, very few of the people who have witnessed the game have ever accused it of being "like basketball."

The game's impressive graphics are courtesy of the Unreal 2 engine.

A lot of folks were kind of surprised to find out that this was the Unreal 2.x engine--it's not typical for a sports game to come out of a first-person shooter-focused engine, let alone on Live Arcade, let alone a sports game that isn't really a sports game. Some people have also just assumed that we've been making HoopWorld with Unreal 3 technology, which I guess the artists and coders here at Streamline Studios can take as a great compliment. While the two engines come from the same Epic stable, they're rather different under the hood. 2.x was made with the Xbox in mind, and so it's optimized for that. Unreal 3, of course, is made for next-generation platforms. That means we've spent a lot of time taking the optimizations for the Xbox, and moving it over to the Xbox 360--trying to catch up with Unreal 3, in a sense.