Implementing Racing Games: An intro to different approaches and their game design trade-offs

mario-kart

If you search online for “how to make a racing game,” you get a bunch of tutorials teaching you one very specific (and very hardcore) way of implementing vehicle/driving mechanics. These tutorials are great if you’re making a realistic driving simulator or racing sim, but chances are they won’t even get you started in the right direction for implementing something that actually fits the constraints of your particular game project.

This article will introduce you to different approaches for implementing racing mechanics, while discussing how these implementation strategies may either complement or clash with your game’s core design. Continue reading

Magnet Ball Mega-Postmortem: How Learning on-the-fly Saved an Ambitious Student Project

basic gameplay

The following is my honors thesis, which is a research paper that I had to write in order to graduate with Honors from the University of Arizona. I had published the first two parts of this paper on my previous blog, but I have never published the full work until now. While I did try to adapt the tone of the paper to be more fitting for online reading, the paper is mostly unmodified, aside from a few major additions made to part four.

I’m going to warn you now; this paper is LONG. One of the goals when I was writing this was to show enough detail so that students who wish to try running a project like this could learn from our process and our mistakes. This project was a ton of fun, and I hope you’ll have fun reading about it.

Table of Contents

  1. Intro
    1. Abstract
    2. The Team
    3. Introduction
  2. PART ONE: Recruiting and Managing People
    1. Starting the Project
    2. Designing the Team Experience
    3. The Recruitment Process
    4. Unfortunately, Our Team was Too Big
    5. Availability and Communication Problems
  3. PART TWO: The Senses Project
    1. A Broken Pre-Production Phase
    2. The First Prototype
    3. The Second Prototype
    4. Turning the Project Around
  4. PART THREE: Pre-Production Done Right
    1. Fixing our Creative Process
    2. Rapid Prototyping and the Creative Process
    3. The Fruits of Pre-Production
    4. Prototype 1: Fighting Blind
    5. Prototype 2: Detonator
    6. Prototype 3: Particle Racer
    7. Prototype 4: Runner
    8. Prototype 5: Magnet Man
    9. Prototype 5, v2: Magnet Ball
  5. PART FOUR: Prototyping until the Bitter End
    1. Our Creative Process during Production
    2. Our Development Process during Production
    3. Thoughts on the Prototype-Centered Process
    4. Things I Would Do Differently
    5. In Conclusion

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