MLB The Show 18

Description: MLB The Show 18 is the 13th installment of the critically-acclaimed baseball sim series.

Platforms: PlayStation 4

Team: 80+ person team

Type: Professional Project (Sony San Diego Studio)

Role: Associate Game Designer

Core Responsibilities:

  • Served as a designer on the studio’s audiovisual presentation team

  • Designed and wrote a number of branching commentary “story lines” (branching dialogue affected by in-game situations and season stats)

  • Directed voice over

  • Created in-game visual presentations

  • Scripted audio and visuals presentations using propriety tools

Tools: Proprietary

Available for Purchase Here

Commentary and Presentation Features Video

I was the designer/writer on the story lines feature. The goal of this feature was to give players the sense that the commentators had memory of events from earlier in the game, season, or a player’s career. We believe that the best real-life baseball commentators use facts and statistics to weave a sense of narrative into the games that they call, creating viewer investment in the characters and the various plot twists and turns that take place over a season.

In previous years, MLB The Show’s commentary package often didn’t acknowledge past events, and just didn’t make much of an attempt a building a sense of drama. I did my best to weave a sense of narrative structure into the commentary I wrote. To achieve this effect I employed recorded statistics to set up characters and plot threads at the beginning of the game, then I wrote mid-game lines discussing plot developments before summarizing and concluding the story in the game’s final innings.

Some examples of the subject matter I tacked included:

  • Competition for the home run title

  • Competition for the batting title

  • Playoff-clinching scenarios

  • 2 ace pitchers going head-to-head

  • Hot streaks

  • Cold streaks

  • Rookie call-ups

This is a difficult feature to demonstrate in a concise way since the player sees/hears small bits of content I created over potentially hours of play, but the below videos give a sense of what I worked on:

In-Depth Features Stream