Into the Storm of Thought

Welcome everyone to the first inside look for ForzeBreak! First let me start by briefly going over what the game is all about. Putting it simply, in ForzeBreak you can control combat vehicles in a survival competitive match against other players until only one remains. Think Robot Sumo meets Rocket League, kinda like super acrobatic bumping vehicles in a whole new level. But that is not all there is to it. That’s right there is more! You will have different ways available to push your opponents off the arena: canons, missiles, grapple guns, and more. This is the game to prove you are the ultimate fighting machine with a need for speed!

The team has been working hard on pre production to have clear goals and milestones through the entire process of development. The first couple of weeks have been mainly focused on brainstorming and laying out outlines of what the core essential mechanics are going to be like. For the first upcoming milestone which I like to call “Stick Shift 101”, we are working on the groundwork for vehicle controls and camera perspective so they can be ready for play testing and adjusted according to feedback. The core of the game revolves around maneuvers and high speed movement. Whether a player is drifting to make a sharp turn, boosting to push an opponent, or just simply going around the arena, it is very important to us that the players feel just about the right amount of control and not get frustrated.

Jason and Robin, our Technical and Development Directors, did a fantastic job of setting a really good foundation for our first play test that enabled us to get valuable feedback on what works and what needs to be worked on. In a brief summary: Robin worked on getting the vehicle controls to be realistic in terms of what one expects a vehicle with wheels to feel like (acceleration , steering, momentum). Not only that but he also worked on camera setup so that the players would be able to see not only their vehicle but their immediate surroundings as well (it’s all about keeping the eyes on the opponents). With our sights on making this game one of the best multiplayer experiences right from the start, Jason worked on implementing networking so that each player would be able to play from their own screen! Thanks to him the team was able to have successful play test sessions of up to four players each on their own computer with lives and a re-spawning system that brought them back into the fight each time a player fell down the arena.

“When this baby hits 88 MPH…”

From the creative design part my task as the Creative Director (Miguel) was to layout rough milestones for each week by breaking down the different aspects that have to be completed for vertical slice. I divided each one into level of priorities from the must have essentials to things that might be excluded if there isn’t enough time. Therefore the first and most important thing to get working for this game would be movement, without it there could be no game. After that the perspective that the players look at their vehicle is also critical as it affects not only the player experience but also the overall design of the game, especially stages, arenas, and the different things we can include on them: ramps, multiple floors, traps, and other ideas.

Furthermore for the Art side we have unanimously decided to go for an aesthetic style that closely resembles the newer Mad Max car design and give it our own unique twist as we further go with the setting and themes of our game (Mad Max in space is one possibility!). With that in mind Ring, our Art Director, and I have gathered reference to begin modeling rough models of the different type of vehicles that a player could choose in the game. For example, Ring has been working on a War Buggy that would be the standard car, the middle ground between our planned types: light, medium, heavy. While I have been working on a hover tank and a four wheeled bat-mobile-like vehicle which would fit more into the heavy category. Furthermore we have also began work on creating rough stages to test out the range of movement and the capabilities of our controls to properly design our arenas. In other words we are answering questions such as is the stage too small to fit 4 players at once? Do players get stuck easily in certain areas? Do players fall off too easily just by driving?

We still have a long road ahead of us as we prepare for upcoming challenges: networking, control refinement, arena designs. But needless to say everyone feels proud with our progress so far as we gained valuable feedback and we were able to come up with our next milestone goals for our next playtest which we will share in our next update.