Our team designed this game based on the theme word Traffic. The main reason about this is that Traffic could be an easy theme to create game. It is a simple game, but we actually met lots of difficulties during the process. The final project actually has huge differences with what I thought.
For example, at the beginning, to best express the theme word we chose, we decided to use elements like little cars and a highway to construct it. In our game, players just need to use arrow keys to control. In my mind, the motion of our little red car should be regular. There are 4 lanes in the highway. When player press left or right bottom, the red car should only move one lane and also the same distance. We tried to let it move like 50 on the X coordination, but it’s seems stupid when the car moves and has some conflict with other settings. Therefore, we finally changed to the way that move as much as players want.
There are some other kind of vehicles like police cars and some other color ones as well, these are what players need to avoid in our game. We used to put them on arranged places on a long highway which used to provide extent playable time. The difficulty change will increase or decrease those arranged cars. However, I thought that’s boring if someone want to play it again, so we changed the background to a loop and randomly create vehicles on highway. Difficulties will increase with time goes on and reach a maximum. Also, we used to have an end point on the highway, we removed it when we decided to loop the background. Under this circumstance, there is no winning condition and no way to win this game. We just set a limit life and a score based on time. In other words, players need to do their best to survive on this highway.
When we tested the game, I found our game is more playable then the initial goal. The red car used to be only allowed to drive on 4 lanes, but now I can control it avoid other vehicles with a very close distance. Also, sometimes it seems surrounded by other vehicles, but they will destroy themselves by collisions. These elements make our game more playable.
Xuqi and Kaisen usually say our game looks like drive on highway 17, but I don’t agree with them. Highway 17 is dangerous because of its winding topography, but in our game is dangerous because of those rude vehicles. We set those 3 different vehicles with three different speed. When two of them collide with each other, both will be destroyed and explosive. We hope people will know how dangerous it is when driving rude.
We played lots of examples in construct 3 and see how it works to make our game better and innovative. The initial long highway is a typical example. We didn’t know how to make a highway at the beginning until we played the game Glokar. It uses several repeated backgrounds to make the playable time long enough. So we make our game just like it, but unfortunately we found this method is not suitable for our game. All of those games are awesome whatever on graph or entertainment. We try to learn how to make a game through their eventsheets, but some of them are too difficult to understand and some function are not free. In this case, we asked Tas and try to make our idea possible in our own way. For example, we want to make our car be unbeatable after one collision and flash. We made our car unable to touch and disappear a while and appear a while to create a flash scene. However, suddenly we found that there is a flash function, then we had to modify it. Finally, we successfully make a playable endless which brings more possibility to players. We overcome some difficulties and avoid some difficulties. We set random vehicles, which could give the game more possibilities like survive from besiege after enemies collide with others. We create a loop background to make the game have long enough play time. We give the red car a smooth control to give player chance to find gap to avoid their surround. I believe all of these elements could make our game innovative.
Although there were so many problem and difficulties, we believe we did our best to create a good playable game.
Xuqi and I made lots of changes in our game on July 26, when Kaisen is on flight back to China, so there maybe some differences between his statement and our game.
