Interview: Fritz of Triple B Games on College Lacrosse 2010 and NLL Lacrosse 2010

Dave Voyles got a chance to catch up with Johnathan Ackerly (Fritz) of Triple B games to discuss College Lacrosse 2010 and NLL Lacrosse 2010.  The full interview can be heard on the JBAC Podcast.

Hello! It’s David Voyles here of the JBAC and Armless Octopus and along with me is Fritz, Johnathan Ackerly, of Triple B Games studio. So Fritz, why don’t you tell me a bit about the studio itself?

Hi, well the studio is Triple B Games, and basically that’s just me. I work in partnership with Carlo Sunseri over in Pittsburgh.  We make games!

So it’s basically just you running this whole thing together?

Well I’m the only programmer on the game, we use some artists and some contract artists to bring things in, and Carlos brings in his lacrosse expertise and manages the social side of it – the Facebook group and things.

Oh I didn’t know you guys had a Facebook group. Where can I find you guys on Facebook?

If you search for College Lacrosse 2010, on Facebook, you’ll see that we’re about 80,000 strong on there at the moment.

Wow, 80,000! That’s not bad at all

Yeah, the more the merrier.

Well did you ever play lacrosse in high school or college?

No, I’ve never so much as picked up a lacrosse stick.

So how did you get involved in this program then?

Well basically through Carlo.  The first game I did with Triple B Games was Fitba, a soccer game.

Yeah I saw that.

And Carlo had picked that up and really liked it and got in touch with me off the back of that and came to me with this idea of a lacrosse game. I’m like “lacrosse? Are you kidding me, I don’t know anything about lacrosse.”  But Carlo explained it all to me and showed me how big it is over there (America), and it made sense.  It’s been good fun.

I think for the most part, sports have a big fan base and following but lacrosse tends to be a bit smaller in America when you compare it to things like football and baseball, but on the East Coast, especially the Northeast it’s huge.  Actually in Canada everyone believes that hockey is the national sport when actually in reality it is lacrosse.

Yeah I heard that, it has a very fanatical following and that’s great for us.

Well have you ever had the opportunity to play any lacrosse title before this?  I mean the only one I had ever heard of before this was Blast Lacrosse.

People keep bringing up Blast Lacrosse but I never got to play that.  I don’t even know if it got a European release.  I’ve seen some videos on Youtube, but I’ve never actually played that one before.  It seems quite nice to go in and it’s like a blank canvas, you know you don’t have to compare yourself to anything else.  You can give it a completely fresh take on a sport which was great for us.

Definitely.  Well are you looking to generate some more support, come a major release like a college lacrosse game or the MLL?

These are certainly things we’ve looked into in the future.  We’ve obviously done College Lacrosse 2010 which came out last November.  We just got NLL lacrosse which is just coming out now and it was nice having licensed teams and players – it just gives it a level above what we had with College Lacrosse.

Well if you had more time, what other features would you have liked to have implemented?

Ok, so there’s always a lot of things we’d love to put in the game, and you know we don’t have time for considering we’re a small time – we’ve got to get things done.  We would like to look at, in future releases, is to improve the online gameplay.  I think that if you have a connection that is poor, we could do with improving that.  More stats, we’d love to get more stats in there, the stats we have are fairly basic, and there’s a lot of depth we can put into that.  We would like to improve the graphics further.  I think you’ll notice the step up from College Lacrosse to NLL.  We’ve made a lot of improvement and we’d like to keep going on with that and improve the lighting models, the crowd, textures, and front end.  Keep going and making it looking better and better in every version that we do.  We want to look at getting bigger hits and a more physical side of the game.  Improving the team management as well.  In the NLL we brought in automatic line changes.  We’d like to give the player more control over that and let the payer choose who is on the field for them.

Well that makes sense.  Did you guys have someone do the motion capture movements for the game itself?  Or was it something you programmed in there yourself?

They were hand animated.  We had a couple of guys, Joe Daniels and Tim Loui did most of the animations for the game and did a great job for us.  We may look into motion capture down the line, but motion capture set ups are pretty expensive.  We’d love to get our hands on a full motion capture setup and go to town on that; it would be great.

What’s next for Triple B?

Well we’d love to make another lacrosse game; we’re just talking now about our options and where we might take the game.  So yeah, I’m pretty sure we’ll be coming back with another lacrosse game.  We’ve been talking different platforms and possibly whether or not we’ll be coming back to field lacrosse or stick with box lacrosse, so we’re just talking about that now.

Finally, if a listener wanted to get in touch with your studio, what’s the best way?

Easiest way is to just drop me an e-mail: manish@simplygraphix.com and I’ll get straight back to you.  We’re small enough where we can about you, or visit us at Triple B Games.

Well Fritz, thank you for your time, I appreciate it and I look forward to seeing what Triple B has to offer in the very near future.

Inside Lacrosse 2010 and NLL Lacrosse 2010 can each be picked up on Xbox Live Marketplace for 400 MS points ($5).

You can hear the full interview on the JBAC Podcast Episode 7!

By Dave Voyles at March 1, 2011.