Although the examples in this User Guide are kept simple to illustrate the relevant points, you’re not limited to creating simple plays with Playbook Wizard.  You can create plays with multiple passes, pitches, and handoffs and Playbook Wizard will take care of drawing the playart and animating the play.

Here are a few tips for creating complex plays.

Focus on the Players
If you’ve used other football play designers you might be conditioned to thinking about players as immovable shapes that connect to lines that are supposed to represent a route or a pass but are really just disconnected layers on a static canvas.

With this kind of software you have to think “route” or “pass” first because you need to draw the player shapes in such a way as to make sure that a line representing a route or pass is long enough and is going in the right direction to actually look like a pass.

With Playbook Wizard you’re not drawing lines and connecting circles to them you’re telling individual players where to go and what to do when they get there. Don’t think about what lines you need to draw to make a play that looks like a halfback option just right-click on the halfback and tell him what you want him to do.

Draw his route to where you want him to pass the ball then right-click on the waypoint where you want him to get the pitch from the quarterback. Pick which receiver you want the halfback to pass to and draw his route. When you end his route, choose “End Receive Pass” from the menu and Playbook Wizard will create a pass to him from the halfback.

Change your mind about who you want to receive the pass?

No redrawing lines and re-aligning shapes just tell the old receiver that he’s not getting the pass anymore and tell the new receiver that he is.

Make Extra Waypoints
Although a player can perform multiple actions from one waypoint or from their starting point you can limit yourself by trying to do too many things at one spot. You could design a play where one player gets a pitch and then pitches again from his starting spot:

but if you ever need to edit that play you’re limited because you added both ball actions to the same waypoint and used the player’s start position to boot.  Wherever possible add extra waypoints so you have some flexibility should you ever need to come back and edit a play.

Extra waypoints are also good for controlling player speed to make sure a play’s animation turns out the way you want it to.  Having an extra waypoint along an otherwise straight route will let you more minutely adjust how quickly a receiver runs the route so that the play flows properly.

Save the Diagram Often
Although it’s easy to remove routes and actions from your plays it’s a good idea to save the play diagram at several points along your design.  That way you can just refresh your browser to remove all changes since the last save instead of trying to remove all the routes and actions you’ve added since then.

This also makes it easy to try out a few play variations if you’re not exactly sure how you want the play to unfold.  Just save the diagram and keep trying and refreshing until you create the version of the play that you want to keep.