Inside the stadium: the crowd, the floodlights and the TV cameras

A cricket match is more than a bat and a ball. It is the noise when the bowler starts his run, the lights, the colour in the stands, the camera that finds the ball in the night sky. We wanted NPL Cricket League to feel like a night match you are watching on television and playing at the same time. This is a look at how the ground came together.

It describes the build we are testing now. We are still polishing, and some of this will get better before release.

A full house, in your colours

Our first stands were empty seats with a few shapes in them, and they looked like it. So we rebuilt them.

The ground now has rows of seats rising all the way round, and thousands of individual spectators sitting in them. They are not copies of one person. Some sit, some stand, some have their arms up. Many wear the colours of the two teams playing that night, so the stands change when the teams change: red for Kathmandu, purple when Biratnagar are in town.

There are aisles and stairways between the blocks, flags here and there, and the crowd is thicker in some sections than others, the way a real one is.

If the stands look the same for every match, nobody is really there. Ours dress for the teams.

A crowd you can hear

Seeing a crowd is half of it. The other half is sound, and this is where a ground comes alive.

• A low murmur fills the ground when nothing is happening.
• The noise builds as the bowler runs in.
• A roar greets a six. A four gets a cheer; a good single gets applause.
• An "oooh" follows a ball that beats the bat.
• Now and then there is a clap chant, a horn or a whistle from somewhere in the stands.

All of it reacts to the match you are playing. It is not a recording on a loop; the crowd responds to what just happened on the pitch.

You can turn it off, of course. The game has separate switches for music, sound effects and the players' own calls, and our settings guide explains them.

Under the lights

Every match in the game is a night match. Four floodlight towers stand at the corners of the ground and light the players from every side, so a batter looks right whether the camera is behind the bowler or square of the wicket. Beams of light hang in the night air above the towers, and the grass is cut in the pale and dark stripes you see at a real ground.

Behind the stands, hills rise against the sky. It is a ground that could only be in Nepal.

Kits that look worn, not stuck on

Each of the eight franchises has its own colours, and the kits are our own designs. The details are printed into the cloth of the shirt, not laid on top of it: the sponsor name across the chest, and a crest on the chest, on both sleeves and on the front of the helmet. They bend and fold with the shirt when a player moves.

You can read about every team on the teams page.

Boards around the boundary

Run your eye along the boundary and you will see the advertising boards that ring every professional ground. Ours carry the league's own badge and the name of Lacspace, the company that makes the game. They glow under the lights, the way LED boards do on television.

Cameras like a broadcast

The camera does not sit in one place. With the TV camera turned on, the game cuts between angles the way a broadcast director would:

• Behind the bowler or behind the batter while the ball is in play, so you can aim and time it.
• Boundary cameras that pick up a big hit and follow it.
• Close shots of the bowler, the batter or the umpire between balls.
• Slow-motion replays of wickets and sixes from side-on, behind the stumps or high above the ground.
• A slow circle of the ground behind the result at the end of a match.

There are more than fifty camera positions in all. We check each one for the small things that break the illusion: a camera standing inside a player, a lens pointed at an empty sky, a stump filling half the picture. When we find one, we fix it.

If you prefer a single steady view, turn the TV camera off in Settings. The CAM button lets you choose your own batting and bowling views either way.

Built to run on ordinary phones

All of this has to run on the phones people in Nepal actually own, not only on expensive ones. The game has three graphics levels. On the lowest one the crowd is thinner and the heaviest lighting is removed, so the match stays smooth. A stutter at the moment you swing matters more than an extra row of spectators.

Who built it

NPL Cricket League is made by Lacspace, a software company registered in Nepal. The ground, the crowd, the kits and the sound were built in-house by our own team. You can read more on our made in Nepal page.

See it for yourself

The ground is the same in every mode. You can stand in it today in Practice mode once the game is in your hands, and you can face a few balls right now in the Virtual Nets on our home page.

NPL Cricket League is still in development. Pre-register and we'll tell you when you can play.

NPL Cricket League is a game by Lacspace inspired by Nepal's T20 franchise cricket. Team names identify the franchises; crests, kits and players in the game are our own, and players are fictional. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or licensed by the Cricket Association of Nepal, the Nepal Premier League or its franchises.