Auto Turismo: Mind of the Champion - The Start
Auto Turismo is a series of racing games created to explore different ways of creating racing games. From different types of games to experiences and simulations (see Auto Turismo Pocket), I want to approach cars and racing games from different angles that are not exclusive to just driving a car, while also trying different platforms (mobile, AR, tabletop, etc). Some of the ideas for the Auto Turismo series so far is an isometric mobile game with automated steering, focusing entirely on accelerating and braking as one of the most important parts of racing, or a coop card-based rallying game where players are the driver and navigator in a rally, the driver identifies an icon to a turn, the navigator assigns that icon to a specific turn and describes back to the driver, who’s driving at speed, focusing on the teamwork aspect of rallying. The one game in the series I’m starting today with is Auto Turismo: Mind of the Champion, a narrative racing game focused on the second-to-second decisions and strategies a driver has to make. That idea is from where I started the exploration. I still keep my mind open to different ways to approach this, but this is what I have so far and some of the design choices I’m taking as of now.
The first step in the design process I took with this idea was to figure out how I’d deal with the storytelling. One of the first ideas was that choices should be timed, to reflect the short window of time drivers have to make those decisions. To connect more directly with the actual choices drivers have while driving a car, I wanted to keep the number of options per decision point limited and to what they could do at that given moment while reflecting the technical aspect of it (choices could be performing a turn in a specific way, shift up or down, accelerate, brake and other decisions to be made during a race.) So to standardize gameplay, the decisions could be assigned to the arrows, to roughly translate driving actions like gas, brake and steering, but to also be able to assign other decisions to those keys to increase gameplay options (respond or ignore team radio, as a choice example.)
Each choice leads the player to different racing situations and outcomes. For the web of choices, I started by picking my home track of Interlagos in Sao Paulo and creating 5 layers of the track, as seen below.
Since I’m no narrative designer, I need a way to scope this prototype well for the idea to be seen and playable, but to be expanded later with more decisions and tracks. I’ll trim down the scope later, but somehow, for now, 5 timelines didn’t seem like a bad decision (🤦). The player would start from a neutral position at the starting grid, and each decision would make them jump to different timelines, +1/-1 kind of deal, with the eventual catch up or complete fail decision to throw variety in the pile. A fairly standard way to start a narrative game, but knowing this already set me up for some next steps.
One of the first things I started thinking was what engine to use. My first choice when I think narrative is Twine, an open-source narrative game engine that’s is incredibly user friendly and quick to get a prototype going. I created a project and started a few nodes, but one of Twine’s limitation is that it is not very art forward, so to implement art, although possible, it would be more time consuming than expected.
In an attempt to avoid using Unity or Unreal, I always look at alternatives that could be helpful, and for a while Godot has been growing in popularity amongst independent game makers. In my research, I found out about Dialogic, a Godot 4 narrative design plug in that looks a lot more robust than Twine, with better art integration, improving the overall level of the prototype. So why not try something new? The current version was made using Dialogic 2 on Godot 4. There’s a lot more I could explore with the tool, but even with my limited knowledge I could create a full lap around the circuit and be playable, with changing sprites showing different directions and responding to the decisions. Dialogic fits my needs and there a lot more room to grow, which is a great starting point for a prototype.
About that full lap, though, I kinda lied. Some initial nodes and decision points were started, but I quickly realized that I needed to shorten the track if I wanted the prototype to be possible (more to give myself a more achievable goal to start a momentum.) So I trimmed the track in half and started with a more binary approach to decision-making, also to use that as a starting point later. This is what the current layout of decisions and tracks looks like. Green means good, red means bad. I thought this could give me maybe 3-5 minutes of gameplay, but I was very wrong. More on that later.
For the art style, I also wanted to go with something more unique than what we’re accustomed to seeing in the industry. Inspired by the Bauhaus, I want to use a simplified colour palette and strong shapes overlapping pencil drawings from the perspective of the driver. How abstract or literal it should be in loyalty to the environment is yet to be found, but with the first design below, I might decide to go more abstract, with stronger and punchier tones of red, blue and yellow. Maybe. The initial studies made me excited though, and I’m moving on to develop the logo for the game and create more sprites to start using them in the engine soon, as the prototype currently uses reference images for sprites for now.
The goal behind having this first playable was a demo exhibit of the work I’ve been creating for my research. It’s great to have the opportunity to show my game to people and see their reactions and feedback. Honestly, showing your game to others is one of the best motivators a game maker can have and it’s a great way to practice your knowledge of your own game and how to present it. In this demo, I focused on making a single lap (the last lap of a race), with flavour narrative to go in between the choices and show more of the moment-to-moment thoughts of being in a race car and how every decision is the difference between life or death (so dramatic). I couldn’t figure out how to design timed choices in Dialogic, so for now that wasn’t included in this demo.
For the first showing of the game, I exported it in HTML and made it playable online, so I could also use a tablet as an easy way for people to play the game. That was the first mistake: the UI does not scale to mobile devices, making the dialogue boxes and font extremely small. I mean… Actually small. So that’s something I definitely want to fix. Second, I made the track shorter to make the amount of work I had to do less scary, but people were finishing the entire lap in less than a minute sometimes. This shows me I have to wildly rebalance the length, amount of choices and storytelling pacing. To try and achieve more interesting and effective gameplay, to add more weight to the decision-making of racing, I need to expand the track back again, and split the number of choices per track segment into a lot more decision points (where to position yourself ahead of a curve and other unique events). Some players also encountered bugs where the dialog options were not connected to their correct destination (rookie mistake), so it’s also on the list of fixes for next build.
This is where Auto Turismo: Mind of the Champion is at right now. It’s a nice start and I’m excited to go even deeper into the design. Beyond just the fixes pointed above, I want the next version of the game to be a full loop, with proper UI connecting scenes and being able to restart from a pause menu. Basic functionality that turns the player experience, especially in exhibits and demos as the one I have, a lot smoother. Certainly more things will show up on my way. I’ll report on that next time.
-fiaca
10/23/2024