Auto Track Racers
Design
Narrative
Animation
Particle Effects
Research
Overview
Working from a brief provided by an industry mentor, this project was all about making passive racing game. The game we produced in the end is a track builder where AI drivers drive around the track. Throughout the player will be watching the drama unfold, and may even help it along through the use of special track pieces. Alternatively, they may choose to attempt some of the missions they are provided to earn themselves some more money.
My role in this project was as a designer and animator. I came up with and refined the original gameplay loop, designed driver stats and missions, and produced several tools for testing balance, along with running playtesting sessions and filtering feedback. In addition, I also worked on all the 3D animations for the trac pieces and the UI animations.
Process
Working on a team with 8 people, we were to produce and present pitches to 4 briefs from industry mentors. I was assigned to work on this passive racing brief, and was the one to come up with the novel idea of responding with a track builder, then refining it. I also took the lead on the pitch.
We then worked on the game for 12 weeks, which involved initial time designing, and iterating on the implementation, while working with the programmers. During these weeks we were presenting to our mentors, and responding to their feedback.
Around weeks 8 and 10 we did user testing, and I was in charge of planning for these and collating the data we received.
Amongst this I also worked on the 3D animations for the track pieces and UI animations, as both the person with most interest and skill in the area. As I was doing this, I was also asked to create the particles, something else I was new to
We worked through several stages, producing a build every week from week 3. We achieved minimum playable and alpha ahead of schedule, allowing time for both refinement and extra testing.
Game Loop
My first task was in creating the gameplay loop. There was much discussion going in circles of how to break from the seemingly assumed direction that we would have the drivers being the players priority. I wondered why the track couldn't be, as this would still fit the brief, if from a novel direction. I then refined this, to be the cycle you can see. This would then be refined further to replace predictions with missions, to keep the game interesting beyond novelty.
Driver Stats
When divvying up the tasks in the beginning, it was agreed I'd take the lead on the driver stats and mission system to start with. As I am entirely unfamiliar with cars, I had to undertake much research, from both other car games, and from real life racing. I made sure to also check in with more experienced people in ensure I was properly understanding the concepts.
This done, I started working on describing what each stat should do and investigating connectiveness, to determine how complex each stat would be to implement. When feeding back my designs, I got criticism for overcomplication, so in response I simplified until we had a happy medium.
This was eventually iterated upon to involve driver behaviour, that is that different drivers will drive with different levels of aggression to match a change in direction. This was also something I worked on with a programmer to design.
Narrative
The narrative in this game is very limited, only the drivers needed any story. Each has a short bio, based heavily upon how F1 writes their bios, with maximum cheese. It also follows a similar structure, simply slimed down.
Additionally, each car behaviour and stat also has to match the character, both of the bio and the car itself, so all three much be in harmony. So while this was not a major focus, it was none the less important to adding harmony to the game.
Testing Tools
Some of my time was taken putting together tools for testing the stats, without the need to run them through the game, while we were waiting for programming to catch up to the design. These automatically responded to user input to calculate how long it would take to reach certain states.
Animation & Particle Effects
On the request of our 3D artist, I took on the 3D animation work for the traps. These were interesting, as quick as they were to make. This was the first time I've made animation which have a direct effect on the game play, making another consideration beyond making them look interesting and feel weighty.
I was also asked at this time to work on the particle effects, something I lacked prior experience with. I am pleased with how quickly I was able to learn the system, and come out with good quality, fitting, particles.
Playtesting
I took lead in designing the playtest. I started by breaking down what we wanted to learn from the play test and the best ways to gather this information. I concluded the best way to go was a mixture of survey and observations.
The survey was initially far too long. This was able to be cut down significantly for the actual tests. Once these had been run, I broke down and categorised the data, by a mixture of what was said, what it pertained to and adding columns for our own comments. This was then fed back into the group so we could decide how best to proceed, what feedback we should heed and what can be safely discarded.
