Posts Tagged ‘Heat Of The Race’

Heat of the Race Design Document

Thursday, August 28th, 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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Heat of the Race meet Battle Machines

Tuesday, September 26th, 2006

I plan on branching the code for Heat of the Race off of Battle Machines. This will probably mean that Heat of the Race will allow for people to register before the game is playable. However, there won’t be any advertising, so the people who happen to just stumble across the site should be minimal. I’ll probably do most of the development work off of the Battle Machines repository on a branch. By the time I import the branch into the Heat of the Race repository, most of the work should be finished and so should the template.

When I stop development on Battle Machines, I should just have to work on the game elements and not have to worry about the user components and start pages. Most of the game elements will be finished also, since Battle Machines and Heat of the Race will share similar traits with a few only a few differences.

HEAT Development Cycle

I plan on developing Battle Machines for two to three months, completing as much as the start and user components as possible. I should also get as much game features done also.

As much time as I put into Battle Machines should also translate into less time I have to place into HEAT. The development I place into HEAT should also be transferable to Battle Machines, depending on the feature. Any fixes or new features added to the start and user components should safely be able to transfer over without breaking anything.

Repositories

The usage of repositories should reduce the amount of conflicts from other developers changes. The other developers aren’t currently using the repositories, but that should change when all of the new development is switched over. As easy as it is to use Subversion, I see no reason why they can’t get accustomed to using the repositories.

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Heat Of The Race: Timeline

Wednesday, July 26th, 2006

The project should be finished in about 4 months. The initial prototype should complete the main user features and core game features. The extra two months would be tightening, JavaScript and XMLHttpRequest, Power Balancing, and security.

Code Reuse Consideration

Different classes will be used on other projects to save time. For example, User, Private Messaging, and various administration pages. There should be a separation of mysql queries from the pages. There won’t be any database type separation, since HEAT is a private development project.

External Dependencies:

  • Smarty will be used as the Templating System.
  • Zend Framework for various useful components.
  • Dojo for special effects and frontend.

Start Date

The project will start after Gamehole is complete, which should be done in a month or two.

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Heat Of The Race: Concept

Sunday, July 23rd, 2006

The type of genre is racing, but I have meant for it go beyond that. I was always fascinated with the type of racing games that allow you customize the car you drive, buy parts, upgrade parts and sell parts. This is what this game is about in the playing. You build a vechicle, drive, win cash, and upgrade the car.

Please note, I will use ‘HEAT’ from now on instead of typing out the full name.

A little History

I just never got around to developing it, because I couldn’t complete my first browser game project. I had never created a browser game before, so I decided to start a project that would test and develop my mad skillz (whatever). I soon found how much I didn’t know about designing and developing something as complex and involved as a online game. The test project, named Mecha Asylum, went through three iterations before it was even playable.

Then I sort of just fell off the side of the universe for a year. I have gotten back into since last September (2005) working on Mecha Warz and trying to develop a browser game engine for when I work on HEAT and others.

It Wasn’t My Idea

I was working with another person at the time I was developing Mecha Asylum. He wanted a Racing game, so he came up with the name and has been on me ever since January 2004 to develop the concept. It is a good concept, however I came up with the idea to have it as futuristic to have more creativity.

Futuristic Style

I don’t know anything about cars, so I decided it would be easier to make crap up than to go through all of the research on the different parts of a vechicle. I think it would be more fun that way. I think I am also going to pay respect to IGPX, since it will be canceled by the time I’m finished developing the thing.

No Research

There isn’t going to be any researching involved, or at least in the first version. I want the game as simple as possible, so I can worry about the other more ‘advanced’ features later, like maybe Research and Development as a game feature. It is simple and quick to just build a car, buy parts, and race the car. Nothing to it and it won’t take a lot out a person’s day to play.

PVP and PVC

Person verses Person is a must, but Person verses the AI would also be fun to put in. I think trying to develop a 4 or 6 person race would be a challege but a good one. It would be more like an event that a person would create and then other people would enter into. If everyone agreed to the match it would go through and they would get the results.

Championships

This idea is much like the one for the multiple player matches, except it would randomize who the players race first and take it to the next level. There will a pause inbetween the match, so that the winner can upgrade. The player can’t take the car out for other races. The player could if they want, race another car, gain cash to upgrade their car in the championship. However, there will be teirs and the player can’t upgrade their car past the maximum for the teir. It would be unfair and since they can’t take their car out of the competion for the other teir, they won’t be able to upgrade.

I think it would be a lot more interesting if there was a further limit to the championships, where a range is given to spice it up a bit and keep it even more fair.

The main problem would be that there needs to be more than just 10 active players playing the game for championships to exist.

100+ Goal

If I can just develop a game that has 100 or more active players than I will be happy spending two years working up to this point. If I get more than that, then I’ll have more motivation for making Mecha Asylum or another game the best it can be.

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