Autopista RR™ Is a Racer at Heart with Strong Elements of Role Playing, Puzzle Solving, World Building and Strategy

Game Design Document

High Concept

Autopista RR™ is a racer at heart with strong elements of role playing, puzzle solving, world building and strategy. A flexible progress and interface system will adapt the game to suit each individual player. A strong mobile focus during the design process has resulted in a game design that ties the knot between hardcore and causal gamers – a perfect match for the diverse demographics of mobile users.

Game Features

Autopista RR™ has a rich feature set specifically designed to tap into a rich mobile experience. In addition to all the basic and enhanced features common to the genre, a flexible game structure will appeal to both hardcore and casual gamers.

Racing

Autopista RR™ offer a realistic driving experience, based upon real physics and is best categorised as a ‘simulator light’, rather than the totally unrealistic arcade driving found in many action oriented games.

Role playing

The Autopista RR game experience (and user interface) is build around the racing team . Starting out as a lone driver, the player will soon need to team up with up to three other characters, for a total of four distinct roles in the team – Driver, Mechanic, Suit and R&D. Each role adds a totally new dimension (and user interface) to the game, and as the game progress and the player is awarded experience points, the player is free to distribute most of these freely among the team. Like traditional role playing, experience will level up characters and opens up new skills and advance those already acquired. As the game progress, many tasks can be solved in many ways. Please see the role map for more details.

Most tasks can be solved in many ways. While some players might combine strong driving skills, effective mechanic and tuning, and research and develop high performance cars in order to reach a time limit, other players might choose to level the playing field by redesigning the track layout and building a tunnel through a mountain. Again, others might use their management skills to negotiate a 10 second additional time, use the teams mechanic sabotage ability to gain an edge over the competition, while the keeping a lid on the story by having strong press handling experience.

Puzzle solving

Using limited resources, puzzles must be solved with limited budgets, options and time limits. Most puzzles solving will benefit from the skill sets and abilities possessed by your team.

World building

World building is both an integrated part of the game progress, and available as a ‘sandbox’ experience. Inspired by games like TrackMania™ on the PC and GripShift™ on the PSP™, world building has been enhanced and at the same time simplified with regards to the user interface – to fit the small screen and limited buttons often found on mobile devices.

Three main modes are available: • Track Module o Race control pieces:

Open (different start/stop positions) and closed tracks (single start/stop with support for multiple laps) are supported. Multiple checkpoints (at least one necessary for closed tracks) supported. Pit area supported. o Basic track pieces: Sraight 90 degree curves – 4 levels, from real hard to very smooth. Elevation up/down – 4 levels, from steep to smooth. o Basic bridges – all basic track pieces can be combined with basic bridge structures. o Basic tunnels – all basic track pieces can be combined with basic tunnel structures. o Special bridges available • Terraform Module o Raise and lower land, piece by piece o Draw ground condition (grass, fields, forrest, mountain, desert, water, urban, etc.) o Autopista RR™ will select detailed geometry and textures based upon heigh and ground condition of neighbourings pieces. • Contruction Module o Construct and place buildings, landmarks, wonders, and special constructions.

Each module and featureset is subject to team having necessary construction skills, as well as R&D skills to produce blueprints.

Mobile experience

Autopista RR™ gameplay is broken down into small chunks that can be played out in 2 – 5 minutes, which makes it perfect for quick round on the go; but at the same time give the player the option to dig into resource planning, management and world building tasks that can take hours to perfect.

Mobile devices often lack input controls with response and sensitivity to match those of dedicated console and PC input devices. This will often ruin the game experience of high-intensity games like racing games, even though the game itself might be a technological marvel. Such games will often be reduced to something you keep on your mobile device to show off its graphical and technological power – but not really play.

Autopista RR™ solves this dilemma in two ways: • Gameplay focus can be shifted towards puzzle solving, management, strategy and world building, utilizing the touch screen if present. • Driving aids, including 1. Optional steering assist. 2. optional auto-breaking with one-button acceleration 3. optional auto-acceleration with one-button breaking 4. Optional auto-breaking and auto-acceleration (with button override), leaving just steering to the player – and even steering can be assisted.

Autopista RR™ also feature an instant continue option at startup – bringing the player right back in the action where he/she left off, with just a single button press.

Internet

Custom world and track designs can be shared over an internet connection. The Autopista RR™ online community server will host top scores and ghosts and provide a front-end for these custom world and track designs – complete with member ratings. Since a complete world, with mountains, cities, tracks and all the scenery can be stored in less than 4 kb, uploading and downloading happens almost immediately – even over mobile connections.

Booster packs - additional revenue

When starting a new game, the player receives a certain amount of experience points used to create basic character skills. Additional experience points are awarded though gameplay.

However, in order to speed up game progress and access to advanced features, buildings, track segments and other special content, additional experience points might be purchased and applied though booster packs .

Promotion / bundling

Autopista RR™ can be distributed as part of special promotions, by limiting the startup and/or max experience points – hence effectively creating a trial version without imposing a time limit.

Technical informatinformationionionion

Autopista RR™ currently requires OpenGL ES 1.0 or 1.1 to run. Current testing and development is done on PC and Dell Axim X50v Pocket PC w/PowerVR MBX.

The user interface has been designed for QVGA and VGA screens in mind.

No floating point is required and even the physics engine is using 100% fixedpoint math.

Target is 200 – 600 MHz ARM CPU, 5 – 10 MB RAM, and 4 – 16 MB texture memory. Additional graphic features, like projected shadows, bump mapping, DOT3 lighting, real-time generated reflection maps, and others are subject to CPU and GPU features and speed.

Required buttons include minimum directional pad and 2 buttons, or left-right buttons and stylus.

Role Map

Page 7/7