#racing game postmortem

[smallnim]

Racing Postmortem

This post is about my racing game where I will demonstrate, explain, and evaluate my development process as well as design reasoning. Like the previous postmortem, I will also be referencing segments of Game Design Workshop : A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, Fourth Edition (Fullerton, 2018) and how it has helped me throughout the development process.

Like always, I started off with a playcentric approach, involving players in the design process from the start to finish (Fullerton, 2018). I did this by thinking of player experience goals, something that players should and would want to experience while playing the game. In most racing games, people would want to choose their own car to add a sense of uniqueness to it, so keeping this is mind I found 12 different car skins for players to choose from which will be taken out of the NPC car skin options, keeping it limited to only the player once selected. In addition to this, another experience that many players enjoy in racing games is a nitro feature. Knowing this, I decided to include one in my own game for players to enjoy and use for gap closing and distancing.

In addition to the playcentric approach, I also worked with formal elements, specifically rules, resources, and conflict (Fullerton, 2018). The specific type of rules which I have used for my game are rules that restrict actions and determining effects. I used these by limiting player movement from passing map borders and driving over environment objects (trees and such). As for determining effects, if players are not driving on the road and drive on the surrounding environment, they will be slowed down or affected in other ways depending on other things they collide or come into contact with. For resources, there is a build up of nitro, health percentage, and time. As for conflict, I had NPCs that the player would have to go against and on top of that, the environment contains several obstacles that can slow the player or cause them to lose instantly if not careful enough.

Lastly, on top of resources, I also utilised dramatic elements, specifically challenge (Fullerton, 2018). The challenge of the game is that players only have 1 life and so they must be aware of everything, merging action and awareness together to perform at their best in order to succeed in the game. Players will also require skill, however, that can be developed through a series of play throughs as it is not expected that the game is completed in one session.

Now with that said, I will go on to reflect about the end result of my game.

The game that I was working on was unfinished, however, I am satisfied with the knowledge I gained while working on the different aspects of it. I would have certainly liked for my game to be finished, however, due to the lack of free sprites with similar art styles, it set me back a lot and made it difficult to make a huge map without having repeating sections. I was able to complete a start menu, car selection scene, and a testing scene for where the player would spawn as well as the NPC opponents. On top of this, I also made a still scene of what I would have liked the game to look like. The components of the game that I worked on were crucial to the overall foundation of the game as it sets the player in, however, I would have liked to at least made a short segment of the actual racing part of the game. If I could redo this, I would have looked for sprites first before deciding what type of game to do, however, that may have changed the game overall and it may or may not have been better than this idea which I'm proud of.

I will now be signing off now, however, underneath this there will be a video and screenshot of my work.

Completed sections:

Code:

Sample Scene:

Reference:

Fullerton, T. (2018). Game Design Workshop : A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, Forth Edition (4th ed.). CRC Press LLC.

[jessegillesigb220]

Racing Post Mortem

My third game and by far the most complete. As opposed to the last two games, this one had a completely finished Introduction scene with instructions which had a large impact on how the game was received. This was inspired largely from readings of chapter 9 of Fullerton’s book which discussed the importance of playtesting in game design. It illustrated the importance of testing. But not just testing myself. Testing from multiple people of different video game skill levels and backgrounds. Doing this gave me incredibly valuable insight into the shortcomings of my game, and the shackles I was placing on my game by not taking people’s opinions into account.  Many players gave feedback about the difficulty of the game, and how it was “impossible to beat” the opposing swimmers. My first response to this would have been to slow down the other swimmers, but Fullerton talks about finding the root of the problem, so I investigated properly and really watched why people weren’t winning. I noticed that the swimmers were getting a huge headstart because players weren’t familiar with the key movements before playing, and didn’t have their muscle memory trained in. So after creating a practice period in the waiting screen with an interactive demo / controls ( similar to the old rugby world cup games ) I noticed an instant improvement. It was a good feeling to improve the game without needing to nerf it or remove the challenge. One thing that I would change about the design of the prototype would be a more centred camera over the player, with crowd noise and graphics on either side. I feel like this would provide a much more immersive and inspiring atmosphere to inspire players to greatness. It would also help to provide more premise and assist players in acheiving the ultimate goal of ‘flow’.

If I could have changed anything about the way I developed this prototype it would be the way i went about doing sprites. I had a differerent animation for every possible combination of movements the player could be in, however a much more effective way of doing it would have been to split the player into 3 parts. Body, Left arm and Right arm. Each body piece could have had their seperate sprites and animations. I then could have positioned their origin points next to eachother to keep them in their proper positions. This would have made the whole process much easier and less complicated.