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Mark Esparagoza

Vehicular Roar (Desktop)

Solo Project | 4 Month

Jan 2020 - Apr 2020

The Roaring Race

The goal of Vehicular Roar is to make a driving game as approachable as possible. So, to perform the main action, I only used 1 button and the movement of a mouse.

However, the movement didn’t feel as good as I wanted it to so, I decided that the player would slowly accelerate towards the mouse. This added a little bit of skill as the player must move the mouse in a certain direction at just the right time.

 

From playtesting, I noticed that players would move too quickly from obstacles and drifting was harder to do. Then they reported that it doesn’t feel like a car unlike other driving games. So, I added a delay on the rotation of the vehicle so it would feel that the car is slowly rotating towards the mouse rather than instantly looking at the mouse.

 

Then I added a dash so the player can have control on tight edges or if they need to get away from a wall quickly. This is to add a little bit of forgiveness and more skill when a player must go around corners or tight turns.

Fine Tuning

While this project was fun for many playtesters, there are some adjustments that I would like to do to improve the experience.

I would change the turning so it is dependent of if the car is moving and how fast the car is moving. So that the player has to let go of the gas peddle at times to add more skill and to make it feel more like a real car.

The dash is a too complicated and is not that readable. How I would change it is by having the amount of dash power the player has as a bar that increases or decreases in size depending on the amount of power.

Then change the dash mechanic to be less complicated so it fulfills its intended purpose of dodging tight turns instead of the player having to plan when to use it. How I would change is have the power charge over time, instead of speed, then the player can use it once. It regenerates when the player doesn’t have a charge but isn’t as powerful so the player can use it more often as something to divert speed to one direction quickly.

Then I would improve the sounds of the car driving just to make the car sound like a car moving at top speed.

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