I’m making a game called Caaargh, and I thought it would be a good idea to write a bit about the development as I go along. This is the first blog post to get that ball rolling.
Caaargh is inspired by one of my favourite games from my childhood, Micro Machines Turbo Tournament. In particular the experience of playing a four-player race, where the winner drives right up against the leading edge of the screen and gets very limited visibility of the track ahead.
In Micro Machines, the difficulty this limited camera view caused the leader created a beautiful balance mechanic that made multiplayer games so tense and exciting, especially when combined with the crazy tracks with plenty of places to crash if you forgot about an upcoming corner.
If you’re not familiar with Micro Machines, it’s worth watching a recording of a four player race see how this works.
After playing a lot of Micro Machines, you eventually race the tracks by memory. You remember what turn is coming up after the spilled cereal or the red cue ball, and you begin to steer before you even see it so that you can take the corner at full speed.
It is this second implication of the limited camera view that I wanted to play with as the core mechanic for Caaargh.
In Caaargh, the tracks become a series of memory puzzles. A bit like that kids toy game Simon, with the primary colours. But instead of remembering a series of colours, you have to remember a series of corners. And instead of pressing you buttons you have to steer the car.
Playing this way is also a bit like racing a rally car without a co-driver.
I’ve been working on this game on and off for a few months now and I think I’ve tested enough of the concepts to want to push this through to be a real game. So as I do I’ll try and write something on this blog at least every couple of weeks.
I’ve been working on #gamedev on my day off today. So here’s the first track generation in action for #caaargh! pic.twitter.com/rxECgMpBrb
— Adam Lofting (@adamlofting) September 2, 2016
The latest news (for those people who’ve seen a bit of this story on Twitter already) is that I’ve decided to target mobile for the initial game release.
In the long-run I’m really interested in making this a co-operative local multiplayer game for PC and console as I think there are some interesting dynamics that will come from the mechanics that I have planned in a co-op setting. But I can also see a much quicker route to completing a nice single player version of the game that would be well suited to mobile. So that’s what I’m working on now.
This week I’ve been getting placeholder screens in places to manage the player flow from title screen, to level select, to level results screen etc. These are not visually interesting to share at this stage, but I feel good seeing the prototype turning into something that feels more like a real product.
That’s it for today.
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