Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 589: How Super Mega Baseball Was Made

Episode Date: December 18, 2014

Ben talks to Scott Drader of Metalhead Software about the development of their successful new video game, Super Mega Baseball.

Hey, what you wanna do today? What you really wanna say? Show me what you're made of. Hey, you know you can have it all. Pick it up and throw the ball. All you gotta do is play the game. Good morning and welcome to episode 589 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus, brought to you by the Baseball Reference Play Index. I am Ben Lindberg of Grantland, bringing you a bonus Thursday podcast, but not as you might suspect to talk about the Will Myers trade, which Sam and I might discuss tomorrow. Earlier this offseason, when we went to a three-times-a-week schedule,

one listener suggested that on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I turn Effectively Wild into a podcast about video games, which I write about sometimes at Grantland. And when I say one listener, I mean literally one listener. No one else suggested that. I'm sure no one else even thought that. However, we are taking that listener's suggestion today. Some of you might remember episode 427 back in April when we talked to Owen Good of Polygon about the release of MLB14, the show, and what makes a good baseball video game. Today we are talking to someone who has actually made a good baseball video game. His name is Scott Drader, and he is the co-founder of Metalhead

Software, an indie studio from British Columbia, my home away from home. Any chance I can get to have a Canadian on this show, I will take. On Tuesday, Metalhead released Super Mega Baseball for PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4, and I have been hooked on the game for the last couple days. Speaking of Polygon, the site just before we started recording named Super Mega Baseball its sports video game of the year, and I don't disagree with that sentiment. So I wanted to talk to Scott about what makes Super Mega Baseball good and what makes it different and how it's made. So hello, Scott, and thanks for coming on. Hey, Ben, thanks a ton for having me on here. Let's talk about video games.

Yes, let's. So on a blog post on your site, when you announced this game a few months ago, you said that it had been in development for, and I'm quoting, freaking forever. So how long is freaking forever? How long have you been working on this game? How big is Metalhead? How many minds have gone into this game? Week and Forever is about five years, though the early years were split between sort of spinning this up and also doing some other stuff on the side to keep some money coming in. It's sort of the cliche basement startup story.

So it was two of us at first and then eventually, once we had sort of a little bit of a prototype together, we started showing it around and bumped into some very talented people who have a ton of experience in this industry. And they jumped in on the project with us and helped us get it done. I think it was probably about six to seven people at peak. Not everybody was working full time at that time, but there was six or seven people contributing. And then back down to about four or five, yeah, four or five sort of towards the end. And we're three full time at this point. So still really, really small. But yeah. And the other thing I should say is that our background wasn't actually in video games, but sort of like more scientific and engineering type software, which quite a bit of translates to making video games.

I mean, software is software. So you can definitely take what you've learned doing other stuff into this industry. But we had to learn a lot. And there was a ton of people to meet, as you can imagine. Yeah, that's sort of the backstory. And so this is your first release or first high profile release. So what is it like to go from incubating this thing for five years? And I can just imagine, based on my own experience with anything I've worked on for a while, before it's done, you convince yourself that it's terrible five times, and then you it's done, you convince yourself that it's terrible

five times, and then you think it might be okay, and then it's terrible again. And I would imagine that once you've invested all this time in this thing, you kind of lose your objectivity, or at least you might fear that you lose your objectivity. So how confident were you that it would be well-received, and how gratifying has this first reaction been? You're exactly right that when you sort of sit amongst just your team and are working on it by yourselves, that you completely lose track of, you do lose your sense of objectivity entirely. And the only thing that helps you with that is like continually putting in front of new people so you know we stress about every

little detail and all that and all that but you know as long as you have someone that hopefully isn't too close to a friend someone tangentially you know that you know come in and try it out and say hey this is actually pretty fun that's sort of like that's what we use to ultimately gauge is this thing ready to ship or not. So we knew that, I guess we thought it was going to be decently received, but the reception has been even better than we thought. We're blown away by what people have been saying. And yeah, it's an amazing feeling seeing all these people talking about this thing that has for so long just been this, just within our team and our friends and family.

And so one of the things we talked to Owen about when we had him on is the consolidation of franchises in the sports video game market and also the consolidation of styles of games. And you wrote about this a bit or alluded to it in your announcement post on the PlayStation blog. And you wrote, and I'm quoting now, there was once an era, and you'll know what I'm talking about if you've been around for a while, when a variety of new sports games came out each year. Indeed, the genre has gravitated towards fewer new titles each year. We once had titles ranging from casual to ridiculous to arcade all the way up to simulation.

A lot of these games lived at the nice overall level of complexity where you could plop yourself on the couch with friends, even if they weren't huge sports fans, and go from having no idea what you're doing to having a blast in just an hour or two.

And then, as you said, this has changed. I mean, right now there is really one flagship baseball title. If you are an Xbox owner, there is really no baseball game unless you count the remake of RBI Baseball, which you probably shouldn't. And we've kind of seen that in all sports where, you know, you don't have NFL 2K anymore. You just have Madden and you just have the serious simulation style game. You don't have NHL hits or NFL blitz or NBA Street or NBA ballers or all these different kinds of even licensed games. So what is going on here? Why has there been this consolidation, do you think?

And what made you want to break the mold a bit with your game well i think there's a there's a proven audience for the there's clear it's not an opinion it's a fact there's a proven audience for uh for the ultra realistic um really complex simulation games and and they've become very good at what they do and have huge followings but but it's more that they've sort of like people have become scared to make something different at this point i think partially you know out of like we can't compete with this or uh there's these exclusive licensing agreements that prevent us from entering this market and having a chance. But we just sort of said,

we can make something for a low enough budget that the risk isn't going to be there that some of the bigger studios would have to take to make something a little more casual again. So it's sort of just a risk thing. I think the big studios, they've found their following and they've got a loyal audience that has very specific demands and it's expensive for them to...

They've polished their products so well that it's becoming expensive to improve the product further. The better it gets, the harder it is to find ways to make it better. So we just said, well, let's do something really new and really different in a really different style. And hopefully that will be refreshing in the current sort of landscape of sports games that are out there today. And it seems like it takes so much effort to make one of those simulation style games

on a new console or new technology that even the big developers have had trouble doing it lately. Not only, I mean, missing release dates or making release dates, but launching without half the features in the game. It seems like that's gotten to a point where even that is difficult to do on the the yearly release schedule oh yeah just sports games in general are are really complex games with nasty uh ai and artificial intelligence and and physics and animation problems like hockey and football you know there's 3d characters running

into each other uh they've got sometimes they have sticks in their hand you know there's just there's just a lot going on and uh they're hard games to build from scratch so uh pretty hard to just decide hey let's make a sports game and and is that why maybe there's been less innovation from the indie market in sports games? Because, I mean, a lot of innovation and great art design and unique concepts have been coming from indie developers in recent years, but not so much in sports. if you're an indie developer, you can't afford an official license to use actual player likenesses and team logos and everything that would cost you millions, hundreds of millions of dollars. But is that why there hasn't been that kind of innovation in sports games? Is it just the bar to make a sports game that actually works and seems somewhat like the sport is just too high? I think that's a huge part of it. Just to get to sort of like a basic feature set

that people expect in a sports game, you're already looking at a pretty pricey project that's going to have to have a lot of people involved or at least a lot of different disciplines involved. people involved or at least a lot of different disciplines involved. Actually the other thing, I mentioned this to you earlier today, but I think the people that start up video games, through all of the people I've met recently, I don't know if the type of person that likes to start a video game company tends to be a huge sports fan. Maybe there's a little bit of that too. person that likes to start a video game company tends to be a huge sports fan um so so maybe

there's a little bit of that too um i have to mention the golf club here obviously because they sort of um they're not a tiny studio but um the team that made the golf club as far as i know is actually pretty small and they really did bring that course editor that they put together for that game is is really really impressive and i remember sitting on my couch like a year ago thinking oh uh oh man it would be so cool if you could sort of like like why hasn't someone made a golf game with a really awesome course editor and then and then it was like four months later or something that they that they announced their game and and uh they did they did an unbelievable job of that so so i think there definitely is um it's like just now become possible like the the tech that's available um for a smaller developer to get started with that

sort of like baseline technology that you need to sort of to base your game on is is really there's some really great options out there. Golf Club, I think, used the popular Unity system, and we used an engine called Fire Engine. But these are advanced engines that were not available to small developers and tended to be sort of proprietary technology for the big companies that were making these type of games in the last couple decades. So I should ask you then how you got into baseball you're you're from calgary you live in bc it's not necessarily a baseball hotbed and as you said maybe the industry is not totally into baseball so

is this your sport or did you just think it would be a sport that you could make a good game about or how did that come about? Definitely my sport. I grew up in the cold prairies, Calgary, Canada, and played mostly hockey and baseball from a pretty young age. And I was better at baseball and played it right up to basically about to go play it in university. to basically about to go play it in university. But throwing fastballs in Canadian April weather isn't necessarily good for the long-term projection of your arm health.

You know what I mean? So anyways, I just totally destroyed my rotator cuff. And that was that. And then got into uh computer programming in university so um those two things sort of like clicked together and it was like oh well what you know how how can i how can i combine sort of what i've learned in my life or something and baseball video game popped out so super Super Mega Baseball is arcade-y, it's lighthearted, it has kind of a cartoony animated look,

it's pretty simple to pick up and play, but it's also a pretty faithful representation of baseball, and the more you play it, the more depth reveals itself. So what spiritual predecessors were you thinking of when you were designing this game or conceiving it? What kind of tone did you want to recreate? There were, I mean, my childhood experience revolved around playing sports and then playing sports video games at home. Tecmo Super Bowl was huge.

Obviously not baseball, but I sat and played seasons in that game repeatedly until the end of time. RBI baseball was obviously a popular, or like we played multiplayer, like our baseball teams would sit and play that for hours on end after games and that kind of thing. People sort of have been talking about Baseball Stars, which had girls in the game, which was cool. People liked that, and you could buy players

and make your team better and stuff. And Super Mega Baseball has the same thing. It has women on the team. It has old men on the team. You can customize the appearance of everyone. Baseball Stars has been the one uh that that people i think think it's most sort of you know you know that's sort of the the one that i think people think it follows the most in terms of sort of the spirit but yeah and i should say too that like you know

it's not just about like i wouldn't say we were going for the simple gameplay of that era necessarily like we we did want and i hope that people see in super mega baseball some sort of some new mechanics some innovative improvements on the genre just a minute but yeah yeah but but like it's more like what we wanted to sort of like take from that era was was the really the the experience that's really conducive to it being social with your family and your friends so really easy to sit down on the couch and and get very quickly to to having a good time so like part of how we did that was making sure there's a there's a ridiculously wide difficulty uh sort of like spectrum on this game the default setting frankly

if you've played any baseball video games before it's probably going to be pretty easy but that's because we want people to try this that uh would would you know maybe be intimidated or a little bit uh overwhelmed by the complexity of of most sports games these days so you mentioned the new mechanics i i've i've been a baseball fan a long time. I've been a gamer a long time. I've never really been that dedicated a baseball gamer because I've never really been convinced that it translated as well to the medium

as some other games do or some other sports do. I mean, I enjoy NHL games. I like the skill stick system or FIFA has the skill move system. It's just this very kinetic, visceral thing where the joystick is mapped to some aspect of the player's movement, not just directionally, but actual appendages. And it just it feels very much like you are playing the game, whereas baseball is largely timing based. You know, you press the press a button to throw the pitch and you press another button to swing the bat. And there's not as much of a directional aspect to it., on what we've seen for decades of baseball games. So how hard was it after all these baseball games, which have worked, you know, in the broad strokes,

more or less the same way for years, to reinvent something? And how did you come up with the idea for this pitching system, which I guess you can also describe for people who haven't played. Yeah, well, the pitching system was actually, like, we had a system in place early for multiplayer when you're sitting on the couch with someone that we liked, but it didn't translate well to playing by yourself versus sort of like an AI, because it's just, you don't need something complicated when there's another human being sitting beside you who you're it's just, you don't, you don't need something complicated when you, when there's another human being sitting beside you who, who you're, you know, you're, you're trying to actually guess what, what they're expecting. It's just like real baseball. There's a real human being there to deceive and, uh, and playing against an AI, like you can't, you know,

you can sort of maybe try to emulate that. But at the end of the day, we just said, we, we have to, we have to do something that's a little more interesting and make it fun to just try to throw good pitches. I mean, pick correct pitches as well, but make it fun to throw sort of pitches. And the idea about, well, we went through about four different pitching mechanics and ended up immediately throwing several of them in the garbage because we'd start from scratch, build something, try it for like two days, and it was over. Straight in the garbage because like we'd start from scratch build something try it for like two days and it was over straight in the garbage didn't work and then right it's funny because the people have been sort of i think they like the pitching mechanic uh it's one of the things that's getting a lot of attention about the game which is funny

to us because it's actually the thing that came together uh probably last of all the mechanics uh and and it's just sort of this thing where thing where the idea behind it is sort of like finding your release point. But you basically are going to pick your pitch ahead of time. And then during the pitch, you're going to be adjusting a little reticle towards the target that you've chosen right in that split second before release. And if you miss that point, then your pitch isn't as good. And the AI batter is likely to take a yard, a lot more likely to take a yard. And if you hit it, you

know, you get that sort of sweet pitch with a better chance of getting it past the batter. And I mean, something I've always kind of wondered about, I guess. So when you start with the Fire Engine, it's made by Sony Computer Entertainment. And so what does that get you? What does that give you? Where does that leave you? Because the whole process of creating a game more or less from scratch might as well be magic as far as I'm concerned. I mean, the game, it feels like baseball, as cartoony and arcadey as it is in certain respects, the baseball moves like baseballs move. You know, you swing and the ball goes where you would expect it to based on where and when you swung. And that seems like a prerequisite. It seems like a simple thing, but I would imagine

that under the hood, it's quite complicated. So how much of that is trial and error? How much of it is advanced physics? How much of it is the engine itself? Well, I risk describing this in a totally overly techie way or whatever, but... That's okay. Our listeners can handle it. But we actually had the prototypes running on a totally different engine before um but the reason we needed to change to a different to fire engine was because uh things like performance and sort of like what fire engine does a great job of is making it easy to to get a game running really fast, fast enough that it feels ultra smooth when you're playing on some of this,

you know, like what now is actually pretty old hardware, like a PlayStation 3 is, what is it, seven years old now. So there's not a super powerful machine behind that, but you still want to have, you know, you're trying to push the graphics as far as you can. So these engines do, well fire engine in particular does a excellent job of uh taking out a lot of that really low level work um you still have to handle all of the like it's not going to do any baseball simulation for you that's all you got to do that

yourself um but but it takes care of drawing everything and making it all run really fast and making it integrate with like well playstation very well they handle a lot of that stuff so um that was definitely helpful and i might have not answered each part of the question you just asked but well so the so the baseball simulation part that you then have to build on top of the engine is that it can you borrow from other games can is it trial and error is it let's see this and see if it feels like a baseball? No, no. I mean, yeah.

I mean, you can't really borrow from another game because you have to just sort of look at – I mean, it's better reference to just look at the sport itself as opposed to looking at what another game does. Because if you look at what another game does, you're just going to pick up whatever it does, which may not be – you might as well just look at real baseball. So, uh, and, and it was, it, it is in a sense, it's, it's, it is, it's iterative. So you just, you, you make sort of a simple version of, you implement a behavior of like, okay, well, this is what a player does when they chase a ball. Uh, and then you let it ride for a few days or a week. And if it doesn't, I mean, you just keep doing this on each element of the sport until you kind of get to a point where nothing stands out anymore. The easiest way to do it is just to look at, okay, what are we simulating the worst right now?

What looks ridiculous to someone that understands the sport the most? And let's improve that until something else sticks out a little bit more. So that was kind of the whole process. Just, you know, like we had some really kind of like not so great looking behaviors in there for like long periods of time. But eventually those became the behaviors that people were complaining about. I mean, not the public, but the people that were testing the game. So that's the stuff you pay attention to. And if you just keep doing that for a long time, eventually it all sort of balances out and looks okay.

And this is something that Owen and I talked about also, but how much calculation is going on? Something as simple as hitting the baseball, which seems like it is a simple thing, that it is largely the user's control, right, when you press the button. It is largely the user's control, right, when you press the button. But I imagine that there is a lot of stuff governing what happens after you press the button. There is the player's attributes or the character's attributes because every hitter and pitcher in the game has certain skills in power and contact and various other categories. So, and you're not necessarily directing the ball as the player. So what governs whether a ball is a ground ball or a home run? How much, how much, you know, under the hood processing is happening at that moment that we don't see to, to have this seemingly simplistic result show up on the screen? well uh secret don't tell anyone this but it

it's actually a bit more wired to the to the input that the player is providing than it is like it's not like oh we're doing you know ball is like hitting the the like surface of the bat at this angle and at this speed and sort of thing. Like you could do that, but then your system is going to be really complex. Then it won't run on PS3. Yeah, yeah. So it's actually a little bit more wired to the input that's provided than most people might guess

if they were trying to sort of like reverse engineer the thing. Because at the end of the day, it's more important that you get the result. You know, just like if you swing at the right time and you swing in the right location, you're going to be expecting a clean hit. So we don't want as much, we don't want anything unnecessary going on

in between sort of taking that input and deciding where the ball is going to go. So it's actually not, you know, it's not a not a lot i mean i shouldn't say it's not complex but it's you know if the ball is above the bat it's going to go up and so on you know if it's towards the end of the bat you're gonna you know slowly lose some of the hit velocity uh and then and then spin is taken into consideration too so balls that are hit opposite field tend to have a lot more slice on them and so on uh and yeah home runs i you you got to take into consideration that backspin on a ball because it's like if you i think there was do you know who alan nathan is yes uh physics of baseball

expert yeah yeah former podcast guest if you type baseball physics into google you can't help but run across a lot of his stuff so that was that was no doubt like really interesting reading like and sort of like just trying to you know like is what we're doing here like semi uh close to what actually happens in baseball he's written a lot of really cool stuff that uh was was fascinating to read uh his name just jumps out because we you know we we had to scour whatever we could find, video reference, just watching the game on TV, this and that, to try to get things to unfold reasonably. But yeah, his name just sort of stood out as someone who's published a bunch of really interesting stuff about how the sport actually works. And one more question about how the sausage is made. How do you teach a computer to pitch? Because this is

something that people talk about all the time. What's the optimal pitch selection and sequencing and whether pitchers would be better if they would just randomize their pitches so that no one could guess what they're going to throw and yet human beings can't ever do things truly randomly. So when you're teaching an AI to pitch, what do you tell it to do? That's actually, that's really interesting because, you know, I haven't necessarily thought about that question outside the context of like worked in this game, we haven't necessarily measured exactly which strategy is the most effective, like in terms of how well a human does versus certain AI strategies,

but random works really well, definitely. Like if you, just making sure, like you don't necessarily need patterns to deceive a human is what we've learned for sure. But yeah, well one one thing that that the game does is uh the pitchers actually as you increase the difficulty in the game they start to throw a lot more uh pitches to the corners and stuff so um that that it wouldn't it's not surprising that that would you know make it a lot tougher to hit of course but um just uh it's i guess it's hard to describe like random does work well i got that we

we had some sort of like other strategies in there i mean count based like picking uh you know the risk of the pitch you're gonna you're gonna throw based on the count certainly helps too like i mean we we all know that that is uh is a you know genuine fault of the sport so you're going to throw based on the count certainly helps too. I mean, we all know that that is a genuine fault of the sport. So you're not going to throw right to the corner slider on 2-0 or something most of the time anyways. You've got to get a strike and get back in the count there. So the pitchers in the game do do a little, like it's sort of a decision tree based on the count.

I could totally bore the hell out of everyone by trying to attempting to go into any more detail than that but uh let's summarize it with uh random is effective and uh yeah like we've seen just from changing the mechanic around that people are definitely expecting that their sort of like willingness to swing at a bad pitch is hugely dependent on the count. If you write an article about that in great detail, I would read it. Consider doing that. I don't doubt it. So it's a fairly full featured game given, you know, the size of your studio. I mean, there's a season mode and we've talked about the statistics or we haven't talked about the statistics,

or we haven't talked about the statistics, but there are full stats kept for batters and pitchers. And we've talked about the physics and there's a leveling system and all the customization. But I'm sure there are some things that you would have liked to include if you had had lots of time and lots of money. What was the hardest thing that you had to leave on the cutting room floor for this game? We had a really cool tournament system partially implemented. It was a local thing. I think we're realizing at the end of the day

that lots of people don't get together in their living rooms and play games quite as often. Maybe it's not even that they don't do that anymore it's just more that like i'm an adult now and not a kid that actually can just go over to my friend's house and play video games anymore but you know i don't know we were pretty pumped on that but in hindsight maybe maybe that was actually a pretty good thing to cut because i don't we haven't even necessarily seen in these first couple days most people are playing the game by themselves. We can't wait to watch people play it against each other on their couch with four people in that.

But a lot of people, they're looking for something fun to sort of kill a free half an hour here and there in the evening. And they're not planning their social life around playing their baseball video games. Yes. Yeah, what else was there? Charging the mound would have been, would have been pretty sweet. No doubt.

And we, Oh God, bat flips. Yeah. That would have been popular. No, there's like, yeah.

Like I can just sort of see this cinematic shot where, you know, if you, if you hit it and it's like clearly gone, no need to watch the ball let's cut to the batter and put on a show here so yes so uh right you can charge up everything else in the game that the throw strength is determined by how long you hold a button and there's a power swing where you do the same thing so that would work well with bat flips also so put that in the sequel i'd love that yeah there's a bat flip mechanic where it's actually a meter has no effect on if you actually do well in the

game or not it's just just how sweet your bat flip is love it uh yeah i actually am primarily a single player gamer but i bought a second controller just so i could play super mega baseball with my girlfriend because I'm such a romantic. So there's no online mode, which is understandable given the constraints that you were working with, but also maybe understandable given how hard it seems to be to have an online baseball game that works. It seems like lag is a big issue, particularly with baseball. Was that a consideration for you? Yeah, I mean, I haven't tried out necessarily.

I don't spend a lot of time, or I haven't recently spent a lot of time playing some of the online modes in the AAA space. But knowing how hard it is to make some of these other elements of a sports game, Like knowing how hard it is to make some of these other elements of a sports game, we already have a huge amount of respect for how smart a lot of these people are. And if even they are occasionally having some issues with their online modes and sort of like nailing a smooth online experience, we're not going to just figure that we're going to sort of keep it under wraps and not assume that we'd be to sort of keep it under wraps and not not not not assume that

we'd be able to do something that works uh great without you know a huge amount of time and effort so that without the answer is yes that was definitely something that came came into consideration there i have no doubt that that's very hard to do and i think the the unsung star of this game for me is whoever did the voice of the umpire. And I'm just going to insert a few samples of the umpire voice right here. All right. Play ball. He ran.

That was fair. Drag. This guy is, I think, my favorite fictional umpire since Enrico Palazzo, maybe. So who did this voice? How did you find this person? Well, there's four different voices in the game. And because of our budget constraints, they're all voices from... It's all the developers, actually.

No one was hired outside to do this. from from the work it's all the developers actually there's no one no one was hired outside to do this we just basically everybody came to the office one night in the evening our sound designer got us together and she said okay guys you know sit down have some beers and I'm gonna sit here yes you can tell that whoever did this voice had some beers first yeah yeah yeah she just coached us through it and made us get totally silly and and that's sort of how that came about but it's all it's all people from the dev team so the question that you the last question that you have to ask any artist any developer is what are you working on and what is next? So are you planning to

expand super mega baseball or port this approach over to other sports or do something completely different? Or don't you know yet you're, you're allowed to enjoy the victory lap for now? What, what we've, uh, decided to do here is like, it's like towards the end of the project, when we were thinking about you know what what needs work what what do we need to put more time into uh like you find that without having it out there in the wild and getting a lot of feedback from people you don't really know what makes sense to do next so we're you're just guessing what's going to be the best addition or the best next thing to do so it's really nice to get it out there

and have people starting to give some feedback. And what we've said to everyone is that we're going to actually sit here and wait for a little while. The number one focus is going to be just tuning what we've already got. There's a whole bunch of stuff that's being shipped there, a whole bunch of code, a whole bunch of features and stuff that are being shipped for the first time. So I hope they're pretty good so far.

But if they need to be tweaked uh if there's some basic things that can be done that are like relatively low effort that make the game a lot better well let's do those things first um and then decide uh where to go after that which could be we're getting requests for for more content you know like more teams more stadiums like additional customizability um another one obviously online's another big one people are looking for like a deeper like a deeper kind of single player mode so like more of a franchise type thing uh so yeah there's sort of these all these other things that people are are requesting and we just have to sort of wait and see which

ones of those stand out in terms of us you know's a balance between how much demand there is for it and how much effort. Can we actually get that kind of thing done in a relatively near time frame? We're just telling everyone, jump on the forums and let us know and we'll have a look at everything. Well, that's great.

People can do that at various places. They can find you on Twitter at Scott Drader. They can find your studio on Twitter at Metalheadsoft, or they can find your website at metalheadsoftware.com. Give the game a try. It is cheap. It is fun. It is refreshingly different from the other sports games and baseball games out there.

I don't know whether I'll have a chance to write about it, although I'd like to, but you can read about it at Polygon and other places and watch some gameplay videos at YouTube to see if it looks like something you'd be interested in. Thank you for joining us, Scott. Thanks a ton, Matt. I appreciate you having me on. Yeah, so we will be back tomorrow with more baseball talk, non-video game related, most likely. And we welcome your emails and questions at podcast at baseball prospectus dot com. You can join our Facebook group at Facebook dot com slash groups slash effectively wild rate and review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes and support our sponsor,

the play index by going to baseball reference.com subscribing to the play index, using the coupon code BP and getting the discounted price of $30 on a one year subscription. We will be back tomorrow.