Hi Folks,

Just thought it interesting to share my thoughts on the design choices done with Getaway Driver School. Let me start off by writing about one of the most essential design elements in it’s current gameplay - the Traffic Cones that give out points. They were not supposed to be there o_O’

You might be thinking “OMFG Jon, they’re the whole point of the game, aren’t they?” Well that’s one thing that iteration and playtesting is important for. Originally, the concepts pinned down for GDS were

1) High speed inifinite driving.

2) Binary left/right movement (that’s another major post down the road, with a lot of history).

3) A nearly indestructible car that your can crash around insanely until a head-on collision kills you.

Well, imagine the prototype: we’ve got speed, binary movement, and obstacle cars lying about. I knew I wanted players swerving madly left and right to get out of tight spots. However, when the obstacles were too dense, the game was a lot harder. Challenge wasn’t the point of the game, it was creating the emotion of temporarily losing control at high speeds, keeping your panic under control, and getting thru the course any way you can.

When you hit an obstacle in GDS, the physics throw your car off just a teeensy bit (that may be an understatement depending on the exact circumstances). In a segment densely populated with obstacles, I found that after a rebound, I was 90% likely to crash head-on with another obstacle and die. I’m losing the “keeping your panic under control, and getting thru the course any way you can” part of the experience. I was daring players with tight situations, but not letting players get to the sweet satisfaction of winning the dare!

The other way around - making the obstacles far from each other - was probably an even bigger disaster. I made test levels like this and I got bored: there were 5-8 second stretches when I only needed to tap one key to move. This was not the answer. Unless you’re like me that just likes to keep tapping left/right/left/right even on road straightways, GDS would get boring fast with nothing to do.

This is where the traffic cones came in. I needed:

1) A way to motivate players to move.

2) A non-fatal obstacle to avoid (the blue cones), so the rhythm of the game has more variety - you’re not always running on the bleeding edge of death when an obstacle comes around.

3) An instant reward feedback system that isn’t just based on surviving a near-death calls with obstacles.

4) A clear way to get thru the obstacles. You may have noticed that, while some cones bring you a little too close to danger, the next cone immediately after notifies you of your way out of a wreck. it’s a 99% guarantee that if you catch all the cones, you’ll be on a safe path thru the level. The only exceptions are “alternate paths” (i.e.: the segment with 2X2 containers on the left, and 1X2 containers on the right) - you can’t get all the cones in the segment since you’re choosing between paths.

It was the ingredient I was looking for. Took a lot of personal playtesting to get them spaced right, and had an amusing side effect - I found out I designed the levels better while listening to music. The cone spacing generally follows a simple, 4-beat rhythm ( Left -> Right -> Left -> Right || Left, Left -> Right -> Left, Left -> Right). This is also where the Combo Meter system originally sprang forth (another more in-depth post coming soon by the way).

Well I’ve ranted enough for now, please feel free to comment on any other specific design elements on GDS that you may be interested in, so I can talk about it in a future entry for the Game Design Log series. Cheers!

Thanks for reading!

Jon