When a player creates a new game in LEATHER® a number of years of boxing action are simulated, to provide a unique game state for the player to launch his gym into. No two games will be alike, as each challenge, result, retirement and weight division shift is generated afresh each time, with a whole new set of starting “seed” boxers.
For our first attempt at seeding the history, we ran the game for 100 years, before throwing ourselves into the action. This produced a game with a rich and varied history: The 1950s provided a creaky 18 stone campaigner of 44 battling to his 5th crowning as world heavyweight champion, and the 1970s produced a welterweight champion who relinquished the belt to drop to light welterweight – winning the title and reigning for 5 defences before rising again to welterweight, re-winning the championship and then again dropping to light welterweight for a second successful tilt at that title (ultimately finishing his career at Super Middleweight when Old Father Time caught up with him).
The 100 years of pre-simulated action was a treasure trove of fabricated boxing riches, but it was unfeasible in practice: it simply takes too long to compute that number of years of boxing history, and human beings just aren’t willing to hunch over their phones and tablets waiting for a fresh new game of LEATHER® to build itself over hours and hours.
So we’re experimenting with different time periods, and we’re currently testing 10, 15 and 20 years of pre-computed history. But these too might be unnecessarily long, and we have feeling that 5 years might be all that’s needed to produce an interesting and fresh game.
We’ll find out soon enough. The release date is scheduled for the end of June, and we’re pulling out all the stops to be ready for then.
