PART 2: Wreckless Rally: Prototyping Smototyping!
Back to Part 1: Brainstorming and Merging Two Genres
Prototyping Smototyping!
We could have the player knock or tow cars into pit stops. Perhaps it is more fun to make chains in place. Would it be fun to allow the player to reorder the cars on his towing chain? It’s hard to gauge any of this without a prototype, so we set our goal for day one: have a working prototype!
What didn’t work
Approaching this like a typical jewel-matching game doesn’t work out of the box. A screen filled with cars becomes really hard to process when the camera moves and you are also trying to avoid crashing into things.
So lets tune down the number of cars. We also tune some other aspects until they feel right; scrolling speed, car control.
Towing cars onto pitstops feels fun but can be a bit hard and one-dimensional, chaining cars on the track feels pleasing as well and provides a lot of freedom. If we keep both mechanics and make one a bonus mechanic the whole core loop becomes a lot richer.
Reordering the cars on the tow chain doesn’t really add much except requiring an extra button, so let’s just allow the player to release the tow with a button press.
Oh no! All our cars are off-grid!
For the player making chains of off-grid cars is very hard, and our algorithm a lot more fidgety, so lets make them gravitate towards a grid.
Not perfect, but it makes the game a lot easier to play.
Giving players more control
Towed cars count as chainable pieces on the board. Making sets on the chain feels really rewarding and intuitive, but players will never be able to tow more than two cars at once without them instantly plopping out of existence. It also means longer pit stops have to be multi color or players cannot fill them easily.
Good matcher/jewel games allow you to intuitively pick up the mechanics, but have more meat to them. What happens if I chain four gems? What happens if i make two chains cascade?
Lets count cars in tow as out of the game and using a button to release. Hey presto! Suddenly longer pit stops work, and players control when to cash in multiple color chains at once. Fun achieved!
“But the cars aren’t moving and this is a race”
Collaboration is both a lot of fun and a lot of frustration at the same. The game feels fun, and now our graphics guy @Flaterectomy is complaining the race isn’t a race! Drats.
Getting the cars moving quickly turns the game into an impossible task; suddenly either the scroll the map faster and have pit stops race past, or the cars scuttle all over the place giving our poor player a chaotic cat herding experience, what can we do?
Let’s compromise. Have a couple of racer cars run in from behind, and have the majority of the cars appear crashed. Surprisingly this provides a great sense of immersion to the game without frustrating the plyer, and as an added bonus, it introduces some themed hazards to avoid.
Come take a look! Not many chances to play another dark-tamagotchi-ish game...
