Greetings everyone! Welcome back for our second round of ForzeBreak updates. Today marks the day in which we have reached our first bi-weekly milestone with plenty of improvements from last week:
Improved Vehicle Controls
Collision & Damage System
Arrow Indicators
Vehicle Flipping function
Improved Camera perspective
Vehicle Boost
New Arena Designs
New Vehicle Design
So with that, let’s get started and get right into the juicy stuff!
Many of our updates for this week focused on revising and improving our “Stick Shift 101” playtest sesion. What does that mean? Well it basically means that driving a car the way one would do in real life is not really suited for a game in which one deliberately tries to hit other drivers to make them fall. In other words, we want our players to experience they’re driving their dream sports car at top speed while clashing and doing these crazy mid air acrobatics, things that wouldn’t be possible life (at least not without serious consequences). So our team’s technical wizards, Robin and Jason, have tweaked the control parameters as well as loosened up the effects that physics have on them for more responsiveness and a more solid grip on the actions the vehicles can do.
That also means that players are able to interact and clash into one another more easily now instead of driving around aimlessly. So with that in mind we have developed a system in which players can call their insurance company after their car has been wrecked…. whoops wrong game. Let me restate that: thanks to Jason, we now have a collision and damage system that amplifies the distance a vehicle is thrown off after an impact with another vehicle! The more damage one has accumulated, the higher they would be sent flying after someone hits them (Think of Super Smash Brothers: The higher the percentage a player has, the further they are going to be thrown from another player’s hit). In the words of our technical director, “Once we bring power-ups into the picture, they will have an interesting and significant impact on how this system works”.
Going on from our internal playtests feedback, players are having difficulty with tracking their opponents in such a big space. To address that, Jason has also added arrow indicators around the player’s vehicle that will point to each of their locations at all times. But rather than make them HUD elements, we decided that 3D in-game UX indicators would be best as other players may not always be on the same plane. “They could be right above waiting to strike!”
Switching over to Robin’s updates for this week, imagine a situation in which one is going at top speed until they hit another vehicle and now they are upside down. Oh no! What do they do? Well, players are now able to flip their vehicle on the press of a button and get back into the fight! (or fall and “choose not to get up”). But to our delightful surprise, this new mechanic provided new ways to play including flipping to dodge, jump, and even fly just like Rocket League, how cool is that!?
Flipping function
Crazy right?! With all the crazy stunts that players are now able to perform, and in anticipation of the countless ways that a vehicle can be sent flying in the future. Robin worked hard to ensure that the camera system follows the vehicle closely without being affected by all the crazy motion and avoid causing motion sickness to our players and audience, “Since the camera in our game has a really frequent rotation, from technical part, it will trigger a problem called “Gimbal lock” which will make the camera literally rotate randomly, from player part, rotate of the camera in all X,Y,Z axis will make them suffer from 3D motion sickness. So we modified the camera and made it only follow the Y axis rotation of the car.”
Camera
For those like me who have a “need for speed”, he also implemented our boost system that allows for a limited time of extra speed and a chance for higher damage when impacting other vehicles.
Boost
With an overhaul to our movement mechanics and the technical systems around them, we have also began work on both vehicle and arena designs to bring the best experience possible with all these new implementations.
Going on from our inspiration from Mad Max and our overall goal for our game aesthetic, Ring has built our War Buggy which will be used as the standard vehicle for our game matches (we have vehicle designs and types in mind for the future). We believe this type of art direction goes really well with that sensation of thrill and crazy fun that we want players to experience as they drive their combat machines into the ultimate battle. Here is a brief look of what we have in store and eventually will be placed in the game:
Our stages are just as important as they will be the ‘playzone’ for our players to test their ‘toys’ to the best of their abilities. So rather than having a simple parking lot just to drive around. We intend to build dynamic arenas with different levels that would allow for strategic zones but also possible environment changes to the arena during the game to add some more excitement!
To that end I myself have also contributed with some of my own designs mainly to test out steering and verticality controls and dynamics. Putting it in other words, I’ve been building arenas to test out the information that we want from the controls, can players turn sharply without derailing? Is it still too hard to steer? Can players go around in circles in the ‘bowl arena’ just like in the movies?
Things like ramps and angles that we built our structures around can be really important during these stage of development as we test out vehicles capabilities. We don’t want to have ramps that throw players off the arena accidentally, or players bumping into them instead of going up. These will be the bases of our key designs as we also measure how big or small we need to make our stages ( and this could probably be a constant process as we adjust our parameters for our mechanics).
All of this comes down to gathering and recording that useful and valuable data to improve our game and make adjustments as needed. So I’ve taken the role of our usability lead and plan ahead accordingly for the following weeks and months. In the words of one useful quote “A schedule defends from chaos and whim”.
That’s it for now, and look forward to the next update. Until then.