Wizard Racing Turtles
| Play | GitHub |
About
A game where you race around a track as a wizard turtle that can summon creatures. It can be played by 1-4 players locally. Made for Ludum Dare 55 on a team of 4 in the Unity engine.
My Contribution:
Responsible for programming and level design.
Designed the powerups the player can use during the race.
Created the racetrack. (Level 1)
Implemented audio and character/vehicle selection.
Development:
When the theme of this jam was announced, "Summoning", my team and I started brainstorming ideas. We ended up going with a top down racing game where you would "summon" creatures to gain an advantage. Scope was a major consideration at this stage, as we wanted time for polishing before the deadline.
The ideas behind the summons were a speed boost, a bounce pad, and a bomb. The speed boost summon would make you go faster, but also make your vehicle harder to control. The bounce pad allowed you to take shortcuts you otherwise wouldn't be able to. And the bomb could be used to block pathways or shortcuts that other players are using. Each of these have an element of risk vs reward as you have to chose between safe or fast routes to gain the edge. I designed the level around these summons, with areas on the inside of the track you could jump over and straight areas to effectively use the speed boost.
One challenge I had with this game was the CPU behavior. I originally had them animating around the track, but when I added the summons, they weren't able to react like a normal player. To solve this, I animated an invisible point around the track instead and had them move toward it using forces. This allowed them to react to the environment like a physics object instead of just an animated one while still driving around the track.
From this project I learned the importance of managing scope. Because we kept the scope small, we were able to add polish in the form of character and vehicle customization, improved UI, and controller support. It also allowed time for playtesting which revealed things like the cooldown for summoning being too long, and the player being invisible when behind props like the rocks in the middle.
Media
