Major League Baseball 2010 (Nintendo DS)

The eighth game in the MLB 2K series, Major League Baseball 2K10 celebrates the immortal battle on the baseball diamond between pitcher and batter. The Nintendo DS version distills this into the fundamentals: Total Control Hitting uses DS controls to let you control your swings to hit for power, make contact or swing defensively, while Total Control Pitching allows you to feel every pitch and put the ball exactly where you want it.

This was an interesting title to develop. The schedule was extremely tight, so we tried to limit the scope to what we all felt were the most important aspects of the game: pitching and batting. We kept referring to this process as "distilling" the design, which definitely helped a lot. Because resources were so limited, planning was extremely important for this project, and knowing which features to keep and which to cut early on was a huge help.

We chose to limit the gameplay stadiums to 2D fixed perspectives. One for the batting perspective and two for the pitching perspective for a left hand pitcher and rigth hand pitcher there were also some pixed perspectives for infield that were created for especially dynamic plays such as a close tag at 1st base. All of these assets were rendered from assets tha twere designed for PC so it would be too time consuming to poly-reduce each teams stadium. Some stadiums such as Target Field needed to be created from scratch using reference art from in-progress photographs as it was being constructed in 2010 which was a fun exercise. I also needed to create 3D collision data for programmers based off of the dimensions that were provided for us and I had to convert the dimensions of an official baseball infield into tiny pixel dimensions for the bottom screen overhead map on the Nintendo DS.

At a certain point we had to do the work of adding final motion captured animations into the game. Each animation was so detailed we needed to optimize out Nintendo DS animation blending and blend each key pose by hand. There were hundreds of animations to do this with and I was at the forefront of making those edits so each animation could have the seamless natural flow they were intended to have.

Major League Baseball 2K10 was developed by Powerhead Games and published by 2K Games.