Heat of the Race Design Document

Posted by Jacob Santos on August 28, 2008

Heat of the Race is a racing simulation, that is text based. The player customizes their cars and bikes and competes against other players. The setting will take place in the future, so that the car and bike components and racing locations will be futuristic.

The player will win money from races and will be able to buy better parts to go faster, and complete races better. There will be racing teams that will help each other and will be able to compete against other teams to win greater amounts of money.

Cars / Bikes

The cars and bikes will have attributes that each part will increase or decrease depending on the quality. The speed of the car won’t matter much, if the vehicle can’t turn at the top speeds. The amount of upgradable parts will be small with the first version, but the amount will increase as development continues.

There are two types of bikes and cars, one will be with wheels and one will be hover crafts. The player can have both types, and unless they have both they will be restricted on which race track they can go on.

Some attributes don’t really make sense, since the player will not be able to control the car and will get the results quickly. It is text based, so there isn’t much that can be done to allow the player to control the vehicle. Future versions might have something from old Nintendo and arcade games to improve the racing experience. The first version will just give the results immediately.

Race Tracks

There will be several race tracks with different qualities of turns, wetness, temperature, etc that will affect the cars. The race tracks will also be one different planets and in outer space. There will be attributes for the race tracks and will also have grid layouts. This will allow for calculating the car attributes based on each race track, like it would if they were playing an actual PC racing game.

Parts

The cars and bikes will have upgradable parts, which will allow for improving the vehicle against other players. The full list has not been decided and will be developed after the game code is completed. The parts will be entered dynamically, so that new parts can be added quickly and current parts can be modified easily.

Teams

There will be the team leader that will control how much the fee to join and stay in the group is. The fee is optional, depending on the team leader and the team leader can use it for gifting players parts and setting as a betting pool for racing against other teams.

I want to develop the team mode to have many enhanced features for controlling the team almost to the macro-management level. I want to allow the team leader to do many tasks for the group, but have most of them to be optional.

This will most likely be a module, so that it can be applied to other games easily and quickly.

Conclusion

This game will be developed next year, during the first or second half, depending on the number of projects that have been completed at that time. Battle Machines will be developed before this, and this game will also be developed after Earth 3045.

I think I might create a simple version, much like the Farmer Sim pbbg, and then continue to add features after the games are finished. I think the goal will be to release very simple game which have all of the features. This will allow the games to be playable, but not take more than a month or two to complete and build off of the other games that came before it. Therefore teams might not be part of the first version.

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