With this week, our Prototype draws to a close and the team starts to look ahead to the Alpha deadline. Many of our design questions have been answered, but now new ones come to light. Specifically: is Buggy100 a game, or an experience?

In this post:

• Art Progress
• Design Updates
• Looking Forward to Alpha

This Week’s Progress

Art

Game Elements

Although not what will be used in the final product, we have placeholder sprites for the boost pads and potholes that make up part of our gamification. These sprites are a part of the rapid prototyping process, allowing us to test these features before fully committing to their development.

Character Art and Animations

This week, our character modelers made progress on getting the pusher mascots ready for the game. Seen below, we already have 2/5ths of the pushers we hope to have by Alpha, leaving plenty of time for tuning and polish by the Beta and Final releases.

Pictured above, we also have our first pass at pusher animations (courtesy of Mixamo), with a distinct “pushing” and “running” state. Although future iterations will need to blend these two together — so that the character pushes and runs at the same time, like they would in a Sweepstakes race — this early animation will be used to help our animators get an idea of how running looks in the game.

Environment Art

Buggy Art

This week, we get our first look at one of the older-era buggies: The Keg!

Possibly one of the most unique buggy designs out there, The Keg will make its appearance at the start of our All-Star race.

To make the texturing and design job easier, one of our artists — Daniela Moll — has been drawing side-views of the various buggies. These side-views help fill in the blanks for our 3D modelers, especially when working with old buggies that don’t have many reference photos.

Lastly, we finally get to see what a fully-textured buggy looks like! As you can tell, just adding a texture makes the object really “come alive,” and feel like something taken from the real world.

Of course, it’s too early to call this buggy “done” — we have to see what it looks like with the rest of the in-game world first. But those final tweaks are yet to come, and will happen in the Alpha/Beta stage.

Design

The goals for design this week were to take the data received from the last week’s worth of playtesting and turn that feedback into the next round of designs. Additionally, we have new designs from the UI team and two “mesh types” that we had been testing!

“Free Drive”

After this week’s playtesting, it became clear that players aren’t enjoying the “on-the-rails” system that we were prototyping. It felt too limiting, almost restrictively so, and the impression of the average user was that they had hoped to have more control in a racing game.

Fortunately, that kind of discovery is exactly what playtesting is for! After some time going back to the drawing board, our programmers came up with a potential solution in “Free Driving,” which serves as a blend between total user control and the on-the-rails system.

This free-drive system gives the player variable control of their buggy:

• At the center of the road, the player has total control to move left or right, but has a limited range through which they can turn their wheels. This keeps the player from being able to turn around and go backwards on the track.
• Away from the center of the road, the player still has control, but their wheel will begin to “drift” towards center, subtly guiding them back to place.
• At the far edges of the road, this guidance ramps up, and keeps the player from turning too far towards the edge they’re at — keeping them from crashing into the wall or driving off-road.

This “guidance” system works much like Mario Kart’s lane assist feature, and (in theory) will keep the game feeling fluid without introducing design complications.

User Interface

The UI/UX team drafted a number of instructional User Interface layouts for each of the potential control schemes. Each of these layouts took into account the following:

1. The Time that the player has elapsed on the course
2. A Mini-Map to show the player’s location
3. A red brake indicator
4. Directional indicators to guide the player on the track (“Turn Left”)

This fourth type, the flight-stick, was introduced as a potential solution to players’ aversion to the on-the-rails system. However, since we pivoted into “free drive,” this control scheme likely won’t make it into the game.

Mesh Types

After the terrain was generated, an early concern was that the 1:1 scale map would feel too slow in the uphill portions (see the Week 01 discussion on “flow”). So an alternative map design was proposed, which would turn the track into more of a “U-Shape” — shortening the uphill sections, with the added benefit of smoothing out the sharp, potentially nauseating turns.

However, this alternate shape introduces a new problem: to make the U-Shape map work, several of the existing building models have to be edited or they will appear “distorted.”

Since playtests have been inconclusive regarding a preferred map type, with most players not even noticing a difference, we will likely continue with the 1:1 scale.

Sound

A goal for this month is to have voiceover present in the game, using placeholder voices for the time being. To accomplish this, the Sound team has begun building a script, complete with when the line would be played:

The reason for having voiceover in by the end of Alpha is to have it available for testing: we need to know if players benefit from having voiceover in the game, if it adds or detracts from the experience, and how well it plays with the other sounds in the game.

For now, the voicelines are largely one-offs, and don’t significantly contribute to a linear narrative or tutorial scheme. Instead, they give a sense of context to the game — which, if you’ll remember, was one of the core design goals in creating this experience!

Looking Ahead

As we transition out of the prototype’s development and into the Alpha stage, we’re looking to make progress towards creating what is known as a Minimum Viable Product. In other words, our game, at Alpha, should encapsulate our core features and what we expect the final game to look and feel like.

Art and animations should be present, even if they’re still rough and lacking polish. Game elements (like boosting and obstacles) should be present and functional, even if they need tuning. The mechanics from the prototype should feel smooth, and most large design decisions (like track type and control scheme) should be settled.

So, the goals for the future are as follows:

• Continue to produce buggies at a rate of 2 models per week
• Finish all (low-poly) building models by the end of Alpha
• Implement free-drive for testing

See you next week!