Stock Car Championship Racing
DQ Reader and Medley Games CEO TC Dale asked me to mention their upcoming game "Stock Car Championship Racing". It's a text-based sim that emulates the world of stock car racing (okay, I guess you would have already gotten that from the title. TC would like some input from stock car fans (and text-sim fans as well), and here's his description:We're looking for input from fans about driver ratings for the game.
We won't have an official NASCAR license (although drivers, teams, etc. will be editable), but we'd like to use the world of NASCAR as a starting point. What we are doing in taking what the “real” drivers and staff would be rated by the folks that love racing, and NASCAR in particular, and comparing the numbers we have for our in house testing group with theirs, and giving us a closer line on what the perception is to the drivers, pit crew, crew chiefs, owners, etc.
By taking the real rosters we can fictionalize the database to bring the ratings in line with a known driver or crew chief, or owner, but it won’t be that a guy from a small town in Columbus, IN, is not necessarily Tony Stewart. The towns and cities, will be real, but the drivers, etc will be generated from a names database that I have.
I want to be able to have the ratings for the drivers (and others) to be as close to reality as we can make it, and if we can get enough feedback the results for the game will be very, very close to the real thing. By using the real drivers for the building block base for the fictional rosters like most sports sims can generate lifelike results without having the license.
I also want the ability for fans to be able to create their own “circuits” by making it easier to import the real world drivers, etc by having a set grouping that everyone can agree on. I hate having TOO many categories, as the fun factor goes down with too many rated categories, but I want the statheads to have a play ground to build in as well.
Plus any feedback from the fans about how they see these ratings for the various positions would be helpful as well. If we have the ratings for Jeff Gordon that says he is a 88 across the board among the 4 types of tracks used in the game, and the rest of the fans out there see Mr. Gordon as a 92, then our ratings need to adapt, and with having their perceptions guide us with other lesser known drivers, would give us a better informed bottom line ranking for the middle of the roaders to the also-rans.
How is a Kasey Kahne on the four different types of tracks? (Superspeedway, Speedway, Road, and Short Track) How does he compare to a Dale, Jr.? The Busch brothers? There are more categories for the drivers, but those four are just their talents on four different types of race tracks.
Readers can email me at tcdale@medleygames.com for more information.
A good text-sim really transcends the sport. I'm not a big fan of watching soccer on television, but I've played more hours of Championship Manager (especially CM2) than I would ever admit. Game balance and a dynamic environment make a text-sim fun, no matter what sport it's simulating.
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