During the last two months, OOTP Developments has spent almost all of its time on developing our future games, Inside the Park Baseball and Title Bout Championship Boxing. Now, with both products progressing smoothly (Title Bout is already being beta-tested), Out of the Park Developments is ready to start sharing our accomplishments with the gaming public. Our goals, creating a stable business base and perfecting our key games, are becoming a reality, thanks to both a core group of dedicated professionals and - just as important - the backing of incredible fans like you.

This newsletter brings the latest info about Inside the Park Baseball, Title Bout Championship Boxing, Title Bout Boxing Quiz and Out of the Park Baseball to you. Enjoy!

Here are the first official screenshots of Inside the Park Baseball, a new approach to sports gaming. The game will combine traditional role-playing elements with a great baseball simulation engine, the same one used in our award-winning Out of the Park Baseball. This combination is guaranteed to create an incredibly enjoyable game while presenting you with the challenge of guiding your character from the amateur draft to a possible Hall of Fame baseball career.

The set of screenshots included in this newsletter is taken from the character creation module, the initial step when you begin your career as a baseball player. Character creation is one of the most important parts of Inside the Park Baseball. How you shape your character at the beginning of the game will dramatically affect the evolution of your fantasy world. Even the smallest adjustment to a single rating can cause two otherwise similar players to proceed down very different career paths.

Note that while most players will want to create their character from scratch, you will also be able to load some of ITP's pre-made player templates, or, import other users' player templates from the Internet.

Step one in creating your character requires you to enter your personal data, select your desired player type (hitter or pitcher) along with a difficulty level and determine at which point you wish to start your career (college or highschool player). Depending on the difficulty level, you spend a certain amount of role-playing points and skill points to shape your on-screen persona. RPG points can be distributed to the following RPG attributes:

Strength - Indicates your character's basic physical power. This ability is generally important for all ballplayers, but is especially important for power hitters and power pitchers, and a bit less so for finesse pitchers and utility players.

Intelligence - Determines how well and how quickly your character learns and reasons. Players with high intelligence ratings improve faster in the mental aspects of the game, and have a better learning success rate when reading books that contain valuable lessons. This trait is more important for pitchers than for slugging first basemen, though it can be a benefit to all, of course.

Dexterity - Measures hand-eye coordination, agility, reflexes, and balance. This ability is particularly important for pitchers, and "skill" position players (shortstop, centerfield, etc.). Players with high dexterity values are viewed as graceful, gifted athletes, capable of making sensational plays in the field.

Constitution - This rating reflects your character's health and stamina. Players with high constitution ratings can perform at peak levels without fatiguing as much as lower rated players. Constitution also affect's the player's ability to avoid injuries.

Charisma - Measures your character's force of personality, persuasiveness, personal magnetism, ability to lead and physical attractiveness. Players with high charisma will benefit during contract negotiations, will likely receive more playing time over similarly skilled (but less charismatic) players.

Luck - Making it as a ballplayer requires a little bit of good fortune. Sometimes, it pays to be in the right place at the right time.

Once you finished the first step, it's time to move to the second one and spend some skill points.

Skill points are determined by your choice of the difficulty level at which you choose to play. When you chose 'Easy' difficulty, you'll be allotted 110 points to spend at a 'Normal' setting, 90 points are available for distribution; and at a 'Hard' difficulty setting, you'll have just 70 points with which to play. The categories in which you spend those skill points will differ, depending upon whether you're working on a hitter or pitcher. Here is an example of how skill points might be distributed for a hitter in normal mode and a pitcher in hard mode.

For hitters, skill categories consist of contact hitting, homerun power, gap power, eye/patience, defensive skills, running speed and stealing bases ability. Pitchers can allocate skill points to control, stuff, velocity, poise, stamina, defense, hitting and a variety of pitches.

How many skill points you are allowed to allocate to a certain category is influenced by your RPG abilities. For example, you cannot have a high homerun power rating when you have no strength. Pitching stamina is directly related to your Constitution Rating when determining how much this particular category can be improved. Furthermore, without a certain level of intelligence you cannot expect to learn more than two pitches, or have a great base stealing rating as a hitter.

Once you have allocated your skill points, the next step is to equip your character with the useful baseball items. ITP features over 300 different items, including bats, batting gloves, gloves, shoes and instructional books. All items with the exception of books immediately boost your skills when used. Some items have disadvantages though; for example bats that increase your power but take away from your ability to make contact. It will be up to you to determine the give and take value of each item prior to making your choices.

Books, as mentioned, are more important for pitchers than for hitters. With books you can learn more pitches, increase your current control or stuff, or simply learn how to read the hitters weaknesses better, resulting in a better poise rating. However, not every book you purchase and read is guaranteed to give you a boost in ratings. This depends on your intelligence and luck, as well as the existing overall ratings. On rare occasions and if you're lucky, you may find a book that increases your hitting skills as well, like the famous book "The Art of Hitting".

Great items don't come cheaply though, regardless of what position you play, so think before you spend your hard earned money on a bat in the sports store or on bBay.

More information on the game, as well as additional screenshots, will be provided when the game nears completion. ITP will be released at the end of 2003 (or earlier) for a price of $19.95!

For more info on the game and progress, please see this thread in the ITP forums.

This newsletter also heralds the upcoming release of Title Bout Championship Boxing, the culmination of over thirty-years of work, from its board game roots to its upcoming computer simulation format.

Those many years of development and the recent partnership with Out of the Park Developments have resulted in a boxing simulation of which the original developers are not only proud but also one that represents the pinnacle of accuracy and playability.

What sets this version of Title Bout apart from its predecessors comes down to the talent and dedication of programmer Andreas Raht and graphic artist Aurelio Barrios. While the designers of the game have given heart and soul to the concepts behind the boxing simulation, these two gentlemen have made them come to life. The behind the scenes coding is cleaner and more efficient, for example, and the graphic interface is not only much better looking, it is also far more intuitive and easy to navigate.

In addition, the voices of both fans and critics have been heard and many changes and additions have been implemented in order to make this boxing simulation as close to perfect as a game can come. What's new, you ask? Here are just a few of the improvements that have gone into the making of Title Bout Championship Boxing:

• A completely reworked Ranking System that will prevent fighters from receiving undo benefit simply from fighting more bouts. In the old system, a fighter with a 40-20 record could conceivably create an insurmountable point lead over fighters with 20-0 records who had actually beaten the 40-20 fighter several times. That will no longer be the case.
• A much more flexible and versatile auto-scheduler will allow virtually any type of schedule to be created in no time flat. The previous scheduler required each match to be hand-scheduled. If you wanted to fight Sugar Ray Robinson against five other middleweights, with each bout fought ten times each, you could do it but it was a time-consuming task. Now, a few clicks of the mouse create the same scenario. Would you like the computer to schedule Robinson against 15 middleweights whose rating is less than 10 but greater than 5 with no repeat opponents and each bout to be fought five times? No problem - set your parameters and the auto scheduler will do the rest.
• More statistics on each fight and each fighter will enhance your gaming pleasure as well. Now you'll see at a glance how a fighter is performing. Additional statistics like win streaks and losing streaks, consecutive knockouts, and so on will provide you with a better sense of how a fighter is doing in your particular replays or league. Furthermore, "leader boards" will show where a fighter stand in relationship to his peers. Top Ten Win Percentage, KO Percentage, etc. will be available for your perusal.
• Probably the most improved area is the commentary. A complete overhaul and extensive testing both before and during Beta has eliminated 95% of the repetition, contradiction and just plain wrong statements. A new system that will replace color commentary (filler) with appropriate crowd noise also makes this aspect of the simulation much more realistic. No longer will every moment of a round be related in text.
• New graphics, use of sounds, bar charts not only make the product aesthetically pleasing but also improve functionality, clarity and usefulness of the replay and data involved.

And these are just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many more "small" changes that add up to a major difference, we simply can't list them all.

Where does Title Bout go from here?

The fact that the upcoming Title Bout Championship Boxing is the best version of the game that we've ever done doesn't mean that we have any plans to sit on our laurels. Two major projects will get underway as soon as the new version of Title Bout is released.

First, we will begin fulltime work on the Role-Playing game. It will be 100% compatible with the simulation but will add the capability to easily create an entire, fictional boxing world. You, the gamer, will be able to purchase a stable of fighters and attempt to build champions, make money and earn a reputation as one of boxing's power brokers. The role-playing game gives you incredible flexibility in how you wish to conduct your business. You'll have to negotiate contracts; decide how, when and where to train; directly determine how to mold your fighters by using their "experience points" to enhance characteristics. It will be up to you to decide when to cut a fighter loose, deal with both his and your outside real-life problems, decide upon the kind of life-style you wish to live and more. Handle press conferences, weigh-ins, deal with PPV television - every aspect of boxing will be in your hands.

Second, Title Bout itself will continue to evolve. We're not only talking about tweaking the existent program but creating new aspects to make the game even more comprehensive. Look forward to more features, statistics and certainly more and more fighters added to an already incredible number of both active and retired fighters.

We expect many of you to take advantage of a new promotional package deal that will introduce you to this educational and enjoyable boxing game. Part trivia, part boxing match and all great fun, Title Bout Boxing Quiz is starting to gather steam among game players across the sports spectrum. Another 500 questions are being prepared to add to the product. Like the boxing simulation before it, this boxing quiz game is going to become a true classic in time!

The OOTP patch version 5.13 is currently being tested by the beta testers group. The patch will feature many useful fixes/updates, for example:

• Added more variety and basic plays to the play-by-play
• Added the option to allow releases by online league members (online league setup)
• Wildcard standings are back in the standings report
• Fine-tuned player development algorithms
• Improved pinch hitting and pitching change AI
• Players cannot be demoted anymore when they are injured
• The Top Prospects list now takes minor league stats into consideration as well, not just ratings
• Starting pitchers are no longer tired for 3 days when throwing just a few pitches in a game
• Totally recoded the algorithm that determines weather a player wants to test the market and decline a contract extension offer
• Improved September call up AI
• Added HR allowed by pitchers to box scores
• Fixed error calculation for players playing out of position
• Fixed a bug that erased the team news when coaches/scouts retired, so it seemed that they just vanished

We expect a release late next week!

We hope that you enjoyed our first OOTP Developments newsletter! Stay tuned for more news in upcoming editions.