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Fuel Overdose: Character design of Ryuhei and Noa is a post from: Fuel Overdose

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Before joining the Fuel Overdose team I mostly worked as character modeler and UI designer on versus fighting games such as WWE and Pride Grand Prix.

So what brought you on the Fuel Overdose project? Why leaving the traditional industry and jumping into the indie adventure?

The main reason why I joined the Fuel Overdose project was because I was given the opportunity to be the main graphic designer with a large scope of responsibilities which is something that no longer exists in the traditional industry where you have to focus on a limited number of tasks. Besides as a gamer I found the project itself very exciting and ambitious.

What is your role on the project?

Put simply I was in charge of all the graphic part, except the character design. My responsibilities cover the design of all the elements that you see in the game: vehicles, the race tracks, special effects, interfaces and even animations.

What were your main sources of inspiration?

As the game takes place in a post-climatic catastrophe universe, I mostly watched movies like Volcano, Daylight and I am legend.

You have worked in the past for big publishers and developers, have you face difficulties working in such a small team?

Many people want to jump into the indie adventure because they think that you can produce the game of your dreams and that you don’t have to report to anyone. That’s not totally and that’s probably the most difficult part of the indie production. In the traditional industry your decisions are backed up by many other people, while in a small team you are more responsible for you are creating. That’s very exciting, but also scary sometimes.

In your opinion what will Fuel Overdose bring to the action-racing genre?

What I mostly like about this game is that is the action/combat system and the game system generates a lot of tension all along the race. The game offers so many possibilities that you are always thinking about what you are going to do at the next turn.

Your top 5 games ever?

Shadow of the colossus, Tactics Ogre, Darkstalkers, Street Fighter 3 and Vagrant Story.

Fuel Overdose team interview: Ryo Tazaki (Graphic designer) is a post from: Fuel Overdose

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First of all, a quick reminder: Our initial ambition was to revamp the action-racing genre, and one of our first decision was to go for a top-down view camera system because this perspective was giving us maximum freedom to design innovative game features.

Immediate fun vs. depth of gameplay

In order to find out what we could bring to the action-racing genre, an “inventory” of the best top-down view racers was needed. So we brought back our old game systems to life and started playing. After a few days we came to our very first conclusions and quickly abandoned two leads:

• The micro-machine formula: For those who never played this game (or Mashed on PS2 that more or less uses the same formula), the objective of the game consists in a series of race where the objective is to avoid exiting the game screen. TNT Racers that was released in February 2011 on PSN and XBLA uses this game formula.
• The combat-arena sub-genre (Vigilante 8, Twisted Metal) where players fight against each other against NPC in game modes that one can find in First person shooter games. In these games the “racing” dimension is totally absent.

The first reason why we abandoned these leads and sub-genres was because we thought that there was no room for great innovations. The second reason was because we wanted to offer a game experience that favors a certain learning curve while the game listed below offer great immediate fun but tend to be slightly repetitive after several hours.

Let’s rephrase and sum-up what we were trying to achieve at that point:

• We keep the “racing” game structure where the main objective is to finish first
• The game must provide immediate fun but there should be several layers of gameplay in order to avoid a certain repetitiveness
• We are big fans of Mario Kart, Rock’n’Roll racing and Death Rally but we don’t want to copy paste their formula, so the challenge also consists in finding game mechanics that would be both fun and innovative

Re-use vs. innovate

As explained in a previous post, most of action-racing games use a “shoot and drop” system. From Spyhunter to Mario Kart, the action sequences in these games mostly consist in shooting and dropping items. We believed that it would be suicidal to develop an action-racing game without reusing these game mechanics but we also all agreed that we also had to go beyond that game system if we wanted to innovate.

Skill vs. chance

Among the points that most caught our attention when discussing about the design of Fuel Overdose, was the balance between skills and chance. In Mario Kart for example the twists are quite frequent thanks to the items, and the perfect example is when being last the game offers you a storm. In some way one can say that Mario Kart belongs to the chance type because despite your skills as driver or shooter, the game tries to constantly redistribute the chances of success among the players. Actually very few games manage to properly use it, as in most cases the system appears too frustrating. For Fuel Overdose we made the choice of putting the stress on the skills because we wanted to favor a certain depth of gameplay. And at that moment we started to take our first concrete decisions for our gameplay. First there would be no pick-up items that would “randomly” give items to the players. Second there would be no items at all. Third, instead of pick-ups, we would implement a resource management system where each player would equip his vehicle before each race, which is more or less the system you can find in Death Rally.

And when we made that decision we realized that we had found the third pillar of our game system, we hadn’t found everything yet, but we knew in which directions to look for.

The 3 pillars: Tactical – Action – Racing

Let’s sum up:

• The first pillar of our game system is the racing dimension
• As we had made the choice of going for the action-racing genre, the second pillar was obviously action
• We wanted to offer a game experience with a certain learning curve and where the player is rewarded for his skills. Put simply, a game requires two types of skills: dexterity and mental skills,  namely in terms of decision-making, so the third pillar would be “tactical”

At this point, we still had identified very few elements of gameplay, we still hadn’t found any solution in our objective of revamping the action-racing genre, but we had the impression that we had made some progresses and that we had raised several questions that could help us achieve our objectives:

-          Action: OK there would be machine guns, missiles and mines like in most of games of the genre, but what else? How to be innovative and still fun? How to propose in a single game experience action features that are intuitive and demanding for the player?

-          Tactical: How to insert a certain depth of gameplay in a genre renowned for the immediate fun it provides? How to propose innovative features that really involve the decision-making process of the player?

-          Racing:  If there’s a lot to do and to think about during the race what kind of driving gameplay would be fun to play and not overwhelming? Is there a room for innovation when it comes to driving?

Skander Djerbi

Initial thoughts on the game design of Fuel Overdose is a post from: Fuel Overdose

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Why choosing a top-down view camera?

Nowadays, the first camera system that comes to everybody’s mind when it comes to racing games is the 3D camera (from behind the vehicle). Why? Simply because it makes the games more immersive as you more or less see what the driver is seeing and because it’s the best and easiest system when you try to optimize the speed feeling. When it comes to action-racing games, the 3D camera is also often used, probably because the references of the genre (Mario Kart, Burnout,…) that are using that camera system as well.

But immersion and speed feeling aren’t the aspects we wanted to focus on for our game. On the other hand we wanted to avoid making another (bad) copy of Mario Kart. Mario Kart offers a very strong game system and we couldn’t see how to improve it and we thought that it would have been suicidal to try to work on a Mario Kart base. What we wanted to do, was to propose something different and innovative by trying to define game mechanics that go beyond the “shoot and drop” system.

Shoot and drop

What  I call the “shoot and drop” system is a system based exclusively on projectiles and weapons that you throw (missiles, shells…) and items that you drop (banana peels, mines…). 90% of the action-racing / car-combat games are based on this game system: from RC Pro-AM to Blur, the action sequences consist in targeting your enemies by whether sending them bombs and other projectiles or dropping mines and other items. Sure, starting from that point, you can imagine various effects for these weapons (freezing mine, exploding mine, a mine that cover your enemy’s screen…) but the ways you use them and more or less always the same. Actually this is a very good system, very intuitive and fun, but we felt that if we wanted to offer something really innovative, we had to go beyond that.

These past years few action racing games we really innovative in their action aspect and the 2 games that come to my mind are Split/Second and Burnout. Here are 2 games where action is not shooting and dropping stuff.

360°

Actually the other problem with the 3D camera is due to the fact that because of the angle of the camera, the player can only focus on what’s on front of him.  What’s behind and on the sides often requires the player to manually change the camera angle which is pretty constraining when you have other things to do during the game. This is very constraining in terms of game design since you find yourself more or less limited to propose game mechanics that the player can see, and in the case of a 3D camera perspective you are mostly limited to what can happen on front of you.

On the contrary, the top-down camera lets the player have a much wider playground, and thus gives the possibility to work at 360°.

Which top-down view camera?

OK then, let’s go for a top-down view camera. But how high should the camera be?  What behavior?

We checked many games and studied their camera system.

First there is the “over the top” camera, used by games such as Spyhunter.

Then you have the isometric camera that you can find in RC Pro-Am or Rock’n’Roll Racing and that introduces a new angle of vision. The camera is not exactly over the vehicle anymore.

All these game as in 2D, but the 3D didn’t really change the positioning of the camera. Take a look at Scrap Metal for Xbla.

Last, I would mention Chinatown Wars that has a camera system that always follows the vehicle so the vehicle is always pointing towards the top of the screen.

So we created several prototypes and here are our observations:



Starting from these observations we came to the following conclusions:

• As we wanted to offer the player a wide choice of action features, we had to guarantee a certain comfort of play so the player can drive and attack/defend at the same time. Using the Chinatown Wars camera in our case would have been too confusing.
• Even though driving must be fun, the driving aspect is not our top priority. And even though the over the top perspective is the camera that offers the best comfort of play for the driving and for the action, it gives a 2D flat aspect that we wanted to avoid.
• Many players nowadays get easily confused when the vehicle points to the bottom of the screen because of the inversion of the controls. Truth is that we had absolutely no idea of this problem in the beginning, but many reviews of Scrap Metal show that it can be a real problem for some players.

So we identified new objectives:

• Make the camera display a wide view of the playground. But not too wide, otherwise the vehicles might look like toys.
• Avoid having a static camera by implementing camera effects such as rotations and zooms. But not too much, otherwise it could be a source of confusion for the player.
• The vehicle should never point towards the bottom of the screen.

So we created a camera system that takes all these requirements into account. Here are some examples of in-game situations:

In this case, there is a 90° to the right. Like in Death Rally the camera doesn’t need to rotate since there’s no problem for the player to drive with the car pointing to the right of the screen.

Later in the track, here is another 90° turn to the right. But in this case, the level design requires the camera to rotate in order to avoid an uncomfortable 180° rotation for the next turn.

Speaking of 180° here is a situation where the camera doesn’t need to rotate.

Last, we have a situation with 2 consecutive 90° turns. First the camera zooms out to avoid having the vehicle hidden by the building, then the camera goes “over the top” while rotating. While taking the second turn the camera slightly zooms in and rotates once again.

Our system is far from being perfect yet but and we are still optimizing it on all the tracks. What we tried to do here is to take into account the aspects of our gameplay and make sure that the player is not taken aback despite all the choices that the player can make anytime during the race. This system requires a lot of work because we have to optimize all the sections of the different tracks one by one, by considering different criteria such as the speed of the vehicle, the angle of the turn, the angle of the next turn…

The first tests show that it can be slightly baffling for the new players. But after playing 2 or 3 tracks one gets used to it pretty quickly.

Skander Djerbi

Let’s talk about top-down view camera system is a post from: Fuel Overdose

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Fuel Overdose: Character design of Hayden and Odessa is a post from: Fuel Overdose

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A lot of progresses have been made these past weeks, we are currently focusing our efforts on the physics and the graphics (maps+ vehicles) and the story mode is currently being implemented. Beta is not reached yet, which means that the current visual assets do not entirely reflect the final quality of our game. What you can see below are in-game screens taken from the Prague and Kyoto  (other maps are coming soon). We should be able to provide you new screens by the end of January to show you our current work on the vehicles. We also added a screen of the story mode.

Prague:

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Kyoto:

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Fuel Overdose: gameplay screens New-York and Kyoto is a post from: Fuel Overdose

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Fuel Overdose: Kyoto map revealed is a post from: Fuel Overdose

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Fuel Overdose: new gameplay screens (Prague and New york) is a post from: Fuel Overdose

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First we have Motorstorm 3D which is a light version of Motorstorm : Pacific Rift ( that I highly recommend). Only 10 tracks for this PSN version but for $9.99 in the U.S. or €12.99 (£9.99) in Europe  you can test the 3D features of your 3D TV set.

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PixelJunk Racers 2nd Lap is a slot car racing game that features single player and multiplayer fun and 32 different race modes. Note that the game is totally free for existing owners of PixelJunk Racers.

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Also available on Xbla, Shank is a  violent  brawler that mixes game mechanics inspired by games such as Strider and Ninja Gaiden.  Based on a graphic novel and developed by Klei Entertainment a, the game offers a great variety of actions  and a very cartoony artistic direction. $14.99/£9.99/€12.99 .

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Last, Press Your Luck is a trivia game based on a popular TV show. Only available on the U.S. Playstation store for $9.99.

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External links

• Shank gamerankings page
• PixelJunk Racers 2nd lap gamerankings page
• Press your Luck gamerankings page

Week 34 releases on PSN: MotorStorm 3D Rift, PixelJunk Racers 2nd Lap, Press Your Luck and Shank is a post from: Fuel Overdose

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