CAGD 170
Racing and Magic, to extent most of my life up to now has revolved around one of these two things. Since I was a kid I have loved race cars and the wonder of magic. My first ever video game I played was a Cars (2006 Pixar film) game on the first Xbox, since then I have followed racing and cars throughout my life. Magic on the other hand began not long after my obsession with cars began. If i stretch it my love of magic can be stretched back to star wars and the force. The real true point I found magic appealing was with the Percy Jackson and Harry potter series. When I got the opportunity here to combine both of these long lived passions of mine into a game you can bet I was exited.
To start I wanted to make a system of racing on a board game that actually encapsulated the feeling of racing. Most board games simply have you roll dice to decide how many spaces forward you go but I always found that rather dull. The most important thing in what's makes a good racer is the brakes. Anyone can floor it in a car and go fast but it takes someone who understands the car and its potential to properly full brake from top speed down to low speed for a turn.
Its this sense of decision making up to a turn that I wanted to apply to the game we made. And so braking dice were made. Essentially braking dice required the player to actively decide to slow down for a turn, this in tern caused a major problem, how to create the situation where one had to brake. All of our core rules from hear on out were designed and made with the intention of making braking important. We created speed trackers, introduced acceleration dice, made turns have speed requirements and stability dice for conditions where the cars did not pass through the turns at the designated speeds.
Choosing which cars to add to the roster was exceedingly difficult for me. I wanted all of my favorite cars from drastically different genres here racing against one another. This grew into an issue when I then wanted to translate those cars and their capabilities accurately into the game. At first (and still) I began to priorities car realism to life over game balance. I gave the race car Porche 917k (shown above) the best stats in acceleration by a large margarine foolishly thinking it would be balanced. It was not. Since then I have been doing various tweaks and adjustments to the cars to make them more in line with a speed that is fun for the game along with toning back the Porche 917k to be more civilized.
As for the track I took inspiration from the real life track in Belgium known as Spa. I choose to base the game track off this track because it is a track I am very familiar with and I believed it would hold well for our games design. The early fast sweeping straight always into the high speed curves followed by the rapid S shaped turns at low speed. The track opening with very highspeed allows the player to start out by increasing speed as much as they'd like to see what there dice tend to average. Then the first curve at 40mph is meant to check those that may have gotten a bit too lucky off the start so they don't gain too much of a lead before the player slows all the way down for the first turn. This leads into the back straight once again giving the player an idea now of braking and acceleration before going into the sweeping turns in the middle sector. Players need to learn to watch their speed as to not get to fast or else risk going off the track here. Finally entering the S curves is when the slower speed cars really come into their own allowing rapid acceleration and braking without extreme risk of crashing. After some adjustments the track feels like its in a fun state where our playtests so far have been successful.
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