CAGD 170 Post 4

Group 4

Our game consists of rolling dice to decide ones speed and racing across a board. On your turn you take the action to accelerate, brake, or use magic. the goal is to get through the board as quick as you can so timing and risk taking with dice through corners is key as you need to brake down for certain corners. Our designated target audience is elementary school kids, as such it works as a good game to teach them basic addition and subtraction at a fast pace (also seems to challenge college students) Core issues we ran into was deciding on our game board size. We had to think about the size of the cars along with how many spaces were being moved to calculate how long games would last. This in turn with making the track map was a difficult process but in the end I believe it worked out rather well. Our biggest complication was the base foundation for the game, we knew that having the car move a set amount based on dice simply wouldn't work for what we wanted to do, mainly because we wanted to have the concept of braking implemented into the game. In order to work around this we went through a few iterations of design involving various different methods of speed management.

We knew from the get go that we couldn't do just dice roll decides spaces forward, outside of obviously not being allowed (and being boring) It wouldn't translate into the system we were tryng to make. So instead we came up with the idea of an average speed. The player would track the cars speed and then the car would move based on that number at the end of its turns. This allowed us to make a system where we rolled dice to increase speed and then cars could choose not to accelerate coming into the next corner. This simple change adds a whole new layer of complexity to the game that worked out very well for our intended system. From there we had to think about the turns

For turns our initial idea was simply if you went into a corner above the designated "speed limit" for it you would crash. As we tested this idea however we found it made the game rather dull, having a set speed and that being the absolute limit was not fun. While there is an absolute limit on turns in the real world drivers chance it and take risks to try to get closer and closer to that absolute limit with risk of crashing out. To try and mimic this scenario we made "stability dice" these dice were rolled under the condition that you were within 10 mph over the speed limit of a turn. You would roll a d20 and add modifiers to see if you passed through the turn or not. If successful then you could roll through the turn at that speed if you fail however you crashed and your speed was set to 0. This added such a heavy layer of depth to the game and was a huge success. Not only did it help to speed up the process but it also added the perfect feeling of risk reward decision making going into every corner. And for those that got exactly 10mph over the speed limit you can pass through at a ridiculous speed rewarding those who risk it and find that perfect line through the turn. After tweaking around car balancing to match these core rules playing with the amount of acceleration and brake dice they had along with the stability modifier we reached a point where the game felt balanced and played appropriatly.