Initial thoughts on the game design of Fuel Overdose
After an initial focus on the camera system, the subject of this post is to start presenting the game system itself. The objective here is to explain our decision-making process so you can understand how we shaped the game mechanics of Fuel Overdose.
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
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