Surface Conditions: Prototyping Challenge
This is a game all about changes in surface conditions. I originally designed it as a racing game for cars or trucks or motorcycles but the more I think about it, this could be a really neat adventure game or fighting game as well. Anyways, I’ll explain what I had originally intended.
Racing games are a great hit among the boys, but they never seem to draw in a female crowd. I’m hoping to change this, not by changing to cutesy graphics, not by using more feminine colors, but through pure gameplay. This game will be all about the conditions underneath the cars and less about the racing.
Each of these different conditions greatly effect the control of the car. For instance:
Normal: the car moves, accelerates, turns, and brakes normally.
Slippery – makes it really hard to steer, you have to move the car hard left or hard right to get it to turn and stopping takes much longer.
Frozen – makes it easier to skid around turns, accelerating really fast can make you spin out, and your car goes much faster at slower speeds because of the gliding effect of the ice.
Liquid – this makes driving more fluid, kind of like ice but not as badly. Its easier to hydroplane so that at times you can try to move the car left and right but it won’t respond.
Rough – this condition is very bumpy, making it harder to turn and much harder to accelerate.
Curve – this is almost impossible to turn on, also makes you drive slower when you accelerate really hard.
Invert – this completely inverts the players controls. Up moves you down, right moves you left, stepping on the gas makes you stop, etc.
Biorhythm -Â this switches from making the player move really slowly for a while, and then suddenly makes them go really fast for a while. It cycles through.
Anti-Gravity – this makes the car weightless, lifting it up off the road kind of like a hover car. If it bumps into things it tends to bounce back a little bit.
Horizontal – this flips the player’s view 90 degrees so that everything is rotated. Controls work like they would under normal surface conditions.
Upside Down -Â this flips the player’s view 180 degrees so that everything is upside down. Controls work like they would under normal surface conditions.
I think you’re starting to get the idea behind this. Although the game would be about racing, it’s more about trying to cope with the particular surface conditions. It could be multiplayer or single player. My thought was that you start off under normal conditions and then as you get better you advance to the harder conditions, upside down and maybe inverted being the hardest ones to work with. Each surface condition should have multiple tracks, and each track should have at least 3 levels, easy through hard.
If you wanted to add another playing level to the game, you could add in challenges — like beat the clock, or a collecting certain types of items in a certain amount of time, adding obstacles as the levels get harder, adding secret passageways on some of the tracks.
This game should be fun and engaging because of the challenge the surface conditions present. Racing can add another element to it but it’s not necessarily the focal point here. Trying to master the different controls for the different conditions in the key.
