SPACERACE: A Look Back
One of the saddest things about SpaceRace was that in the process of brutally paring it down as deadlines slipped by us was how much of the Level Design got cut. The final product more accurately reflects the first prototype we did than the game design document.
Most of the reworking we did on the prototype was about making sure both our marketing personas would be satisfied. In the market research the gender difference between them showed some clear diversions in their preferences. Colour, competitiveness, customisation, and context where were the the key areas my market research dug up. While the priorities of my marketing personas were quite different, they weren’t necessarily conflicting. I ended up focusing more on how to make this game friendly for women, not because I was ignoring my other marketing persona, but because most of their preferences were already built into industry standard practice.
Women don’t like brown games. That was probably the most firm statistical trend in colour preference. Men weren’t as fussy, but tended to more bold and contrasting colour schemes. Women prefer something a bit more muted. So the very first idea thrown in the garbage bin was making this game look like another retro space game, with a solid black background and neon HUD. The beauty in space isn’t all stark and empty. And on reflection, ‘retro’ probably doesn’t have the same nostalgia for women, because for them that time period of games was less than welcoming. To generalise heavily, women value context, exploration and simulation over competitiveness. They feel more comfortable with strategic gameplay than gameplay based purely in reactive speed.
So how to go about fixing a retro, reaction speed, space racing game to be more accessible? Firstly I established a clearer context that supported an appealing art style. The exploding sun became a protostar, igniting to new life inside a nebula. I shifted the gameplay tension from escaping death to wasted chance. The narrative which should have been in the final game was the igniting of a star, riding the waves of radiation ahead of it’s expanding explosion to collect resources, going as far as you could until your space folding teleport whisked you away to safety at the last possible moment, nearly engulfed in flames. It introduced frameworks that allowed me to make many of the gameplay elements more diagetic: your ship doesn’t get blown up, you still have it. The setting constantly changes, and you race in different nebulae. Failure matters, but not as much as your thrill seeking motivation to go as far as you can. We even planned to make the ad delivery more diagetic, with the robot chop shop manager offering you discounts for checking them out.
Adapting the gameplay to allow the player more agency in their play style and individual goal setting was just as important. I always remember the creator of QWOP saying that not including global score charts was one of his best decisions. The game is shamelessly difficult, and he felt that forcing players to compare themselves to others took away the weight of their choice of goal. Some players were thrilled to make it just a few metres, others inched their way over the entire course to just as much satisfaction. Who was he to tell players that wasn’t good enough? For SpaceRace victory is flexible, and global score charts are replaced with achievement tracking.
One of the ways we enabled agency in the gameplay is that it is actually impossible to go after all the different kinds of victory at once. The available ships represent different kinds of gameplay, and offer different amounts of support to the different player set goals. If collecting scrap is your goal, you will be weighed down by it and are unlikely to make record distances. If distance is your goal, and you opt for speed to make it happen, you’ll have to put reaction speed to the test as things hurtle at you faster. Or you can take a more patient and strategic approach with a slower ship and clever use of its weapon, a safer but slower option. We put motivators in place for the different goals, and to compensate somewhat for the loss of tension in the end of a race, particularly in the form of cosmetics and customisation. In the customisation we didn’t entirely neglect the original nostalgia, focusing on cosmetic unlockable ships that embraced pop culture references.
Alas, our plans didn’t get to full implementation. But the process was well on the way. In the final stages of development much of my time was dedicated to implementing this level design and game feel. I went out of my way to provide more useful dynamic information to the player, mostly with more diegetic animation. The biggest success had to be in creating a more immersive sense of movement that better represented the players actions and consequences. A parallaxing midground made the ship speed more visibly apparent, and therefore also the effects of players boosting and hitting things. Tying vertical movement speed to weight communicated a more sluggish feel to the steering of the heavier ships. It isn’t enough for the invisible gameplay rules to be interactive, a player has to be able to see and feel the consequences of their actions within the virtual space or they may as well not exist.
Some of the things I wanted to include, we just didn’t get done, and it’s a shame, as it was such a good concept. Haptic feedback for collisions, a character for the chop shop and some nice ways players could create their own experience. I could have done more to clearly communicate my vision for this game. A proper art bible and some more documentation. But I was on asset production, which is really an extension of the design process for me, not separate from it.
