Tire Fire Rally - Designing the Sky

    One of the admittedly attractive parts of making a racing game is how restricted the player is. Open worlds take a lot to fill, and as a one person studio, I don't have a lot of extra time to fill them. In a racing game, the player is pretty much trapped in the track. You can only do so much, or that was my mindset at the beginning of this project.

    My first test map for Tire Fire Rally was a basic oval with high crash walls, partially to keep the player from falling out of the track during a crash and partially to stop the player from seeing the vast, empty plane around them. It was easy to build and took no work on the background scenery to hide the horizon and I thought I had cleverly saved a huge amount of time, but I had a problem with it. I kept getting “lost” on the track. Not actually lost, it was a one lane loop after all, but I kept having trouble orienting myself, figuring out how far I'd gone, how fast I was moving, if I was anywhere near the finish line or not. You know, all the important parts of driving.

    Years ago, I watched a GDC talk about designing non-uniform hallways to keep the player from getting lost in the monotony. I also remember how the hospital hallways were painted up in wild colors and huge numbers on the wall when my kids were born. It helped the sleep deprived new parents not get lost when they wandered out for burnt coffee. My tracks needed landmarks, colors, non-uniformity to give the players some sense of space and direction. It’s not like the tracks on Hydro Thunder are that crazy for no reason.

    For starters, I've taken the crash walls down a little bit. The surrounding scenery might take more work, but it’s there for a reason. I've started to fill the tracks with stupid advertisements, billboards strapped over the track, speakers and cameras hanging into the roadway, unnecessary tunnels, buildings hulking in the background, palm trees lurking just outside the walls. Anything and everything that can flash in the corner of the players eyes and give them a marker. It’s been a lot of fun, somewhere in between writing jokes for Vice City radio and drawing a page for Where’s Waldo.

    It’s also been a nice reminder of what map design actually should boil down to. I personally like simulation games, and sometimes get bogged down in creating a functional simulated world that the player can also exist in, but this world is not like that. The only things that need to exist in this world are the cars, the track, and things directly visible from said track. And all the space visible from the track needs to be filled. It’s a reminder that buildings can stop whenever they fall out of sight and don't need to neatly fit into the ground. Birds don't need to have a fully modeled and textured top side. Crowds can be flat if the player only sees them from one side. It all only needs to look good and hang together from one specific angle, and all the rest can be loose wires and sharp corners.

    I don't think I have any more coherence to this thought. It’s just been fun designing a world in such a different way than I ever have before. And I guess I'm reminding myself that every time I think I am designing a project to avoid some kind of work, I will find a whole new kind to throw myself into.

    If you want to see some flat crowds for yourself, give Tire Fire Rally a wish list on Steam, and maybe spread the game around a bit. Get some other eyeballs on it.

Later.