ROAD RAGE: DEER!!!
Skip to main content
eScholarship
Open Access Publications from the University of California

ROAD RAGE: DEER!!!

No data is associated with this publication.
Abstract

Our game, ROAD RAGE: DEER!!!, is a simple game in which the player can control a deer running on a highway. Your only goal is to dodge the vehicles coming to you from the top of the screen. The further you go along the road, the higher the score will be. The goal for this game, as of the goal for any games, is to make the player feel fun. In doing that, we made the game simple in its form and control but challenging. The player experience is a core to make a good game, as we talked in class. Thus this game is designed in such a way that one can play during one’s short spared time, for example, when having a noon break at work. For gameplay, we made the game to have a third-person fixed camera view from above. In such a way you can pay attention to the vehicles from above while controlling the deer, and make early decisions to doge in certain directions before the vehicles got near to the deer. The game control is very simple, you can just move the deer left or right in a fixed speed, yet to make it’s simple but challenging and fun, we made a bunch of different types of vehicles with different speed depending on their type, some of them also have accelerations, which means they can get faster and faster over time, making the game more challenging over time. For example, the race car in the game has a big acceleration, but it also appears on the screen less frequently than other vehicles. To make it’s challenging and at the same time playable, we added a sound effect for the race car. So every time it comes out you can hear a warning and the sound of speed up can make the player more excited. For the art style, we choose 2D pixel style. This art style not just because it keeps the game simple and intuitive, but also makes the game less realistic. In such a way when the deer explodes when hit a car, people would feel less uncomfortable compared to seeing an actual deer die. Another class concepts we engaged in our game is about choosing art style: the level of abstract. In the class, we talked about how the level of abstract of the characters can affect the feeling of the player. The more abstract the expression is in art style, the more strong the emotion and be demonstrated, and make the player substitute more into the game. When we are deciding what art style to use, as I talked in the first part of this essay, we are thinking about what it’s level of abstract should be. One crucial reason we choose 2D pixel is that its an abstract style, and this style can greatly reduce the realistic of the characters: deer, cars, and explosions, while demonstrating the part we want. If we make the deer very like a real one, then it might be very violent when it hit a car and explode. But by making it pixel-like, we emphasized the explosion and running of the deer, and decreased the violence level.  This game was originally inspired by the chrome dinosaur game, in which you can control a dinosaur and jump to dodge the obstacles, the scoring system for our game is similar to that of the chrome game. Yet the innovation of our game is found in making the player view from above, make the obstacles coming to you instead of moving to obstacles, and instead of jumping to dodge using moving to dodge. A funny video found online about a lost deer running in a city in Japan and jumped over the fence and fall into a river also inspired us. The topic of the game is about deer and traffic, which perfectly combined two of the keywords for this project. We innovatively made the different types of vehicles in this game to have different features in speed, making such a looping game less repeating. Also, our game has an explosion effect for the deer when it hits a car instead of the flicker effect for most similar games like Floppy Bird; and the present of pixel art style with simple animations makes the game cute and energetic(Just like its name!).  Those are the futures you can’t find in other games. I asked three of my friends playtest this game. Two of them, without much game-playing experience, found it’s too hard to play at the beginning. I found out it probably because the starting position of the deer is facing the starting position of the race car, the fastest car in this game. So we changed the starting position of the deer and cars a little bit to make it easier to start with. After this change two of the playtesters feel its a funny and challenging game, but one of them still feels it's too hard. One of the reason might be he was playing with a phone and the control by touching the screen is not very good, due to the size of the game viewport. But all of them do like the music and sound effect of the game and told me its very suitable for such a highway-dodging game.

Main Content

zhupengpei_22448_1460369_ROAD_RAGE_DEER__.c3p

Download