Grrrrr

The bad news:

For some reason, my domain hosts have decided to break grandprixtycoon.co.uk... so it no longer redirects anywhere useful. As you can imagine, I'm working to try and get this fixed ASAP. Until then you can use http://www.rushyo.com/gpt

The good news:

I've actually gotten around to making a few screenies of recent work. The game still isn't ready for alpha testing but it's getting alot closer. For those who aren't familiar with our work, alpha testing doesn't take a very long amount of time. We do most of our testing for bugs in the early beta stages.

In other words, it's not that far from being playable.

Make your way over to the website to view those screenshots!

Competition!

Over the university term I have been working on a DirectX 9 engine and learning how to write vertex and pixel shaders. I've made a few changes to Grand Prix Tycoon in this time but nothing particularly exciting.

I'm currently working on research and development. Over the course of the season you can improve the quality of your next year's chassis but for each improvement you will increase the cost. Even worse, there's the RRA regulations to consider on whether you can use the previous year's stuff.

So anyway, you're probably wondering what the competition is:

Write a business plan for a Grand Prix supplier. You can be supplying tyres, engines, electronics, brakes, fuel, etc and whoever writes the best will see their fictional business in the game as one of the AI businesses that every player will see and use. References to real suppliers in the name aren't allowed (no 'Badyear's... please) but are fine if only referenced in the business plan.

Things to think about adding:

How will your supplier overcome RRA regulations?
Are there any cutting edge technologies in the field your supplier could take advantage of?
What kind of budget would a supplier have?
How does your board of directors work, assuming you have one?

IP3 engine is gold!

A Quasit-Rushyo Games release (Feudal Britannia) has been remodelled in the IP3 engine. The engine includes integrated forums, a UI model similar to Grand Prix Tycoon and many libraries (bits of code) which I will be transposing over to GPT.

Now work on Grand Prix Tycoon will continue in earnest and a new range of screenshots should be available reasonably soon :)

Concurrent Development

I am currently working on developing algorithms and routines to protect the game from hacking attacks, to reduce the likelihood of bugs and make everything run faster with less strain on the server.

The architecture being used by Grand Prix Tycoon is similar to the new IP3 engine being developed by Quasit-Rushyo Games so the two engines are being developed simulatenously.

The engine which supports Grand Prix Tycoon is far in advance of previous releases and should, hopefully, reflect our passion for creating a professional game. The end benefits for the player are that the server will be able to support more players, the game will run faster and, most importantly, will be as bug-free as possible.

If it seems like a step back, don't worry. No work done so far on Grand Prix Tycoon will be affected and the improved architecture will actually make production go rather faster.

Release date extended

Despite what the title might suggest, Grand Prix Tycoon is certainly not going the way of the vapourware :) However, in light of the excellent progress being made with GPT, it has been decided that additional time will be spent and the design extended, to ensure Grand Prix Tycoon is the excellent release it should be. We would rather take more time to craft an excellent game than write a simply 'good' game.

This will mean bringing in additional technologies (whilst 3d implementations have been scrapped, we are experimenting with other ways to enhance the immersion of the game) and adding more things, which will take time. I hope you can appreciate the end result will be better.

I, and the team, have no intention at all of scrapping this project... we just want to see it succeed in the best possible way.

3d Online Development

I have been looking at Java-based DirectX solutions that might allow 3d visuals for Grand Prix Tycoon. Nothing complicated you understand, just a little spice to the menus.

However, all the current solutions seem a little lightweight for what I want to do (no access to the rendering pipelines, whereas my DX solutions are very low-level) and all are inordinately complicated for even the most simple actions (and this is compared to DirectX development in C++).

As I was writing this, I was asked by someone why I don't develop my games in DirectX and instead use browsers. Here's a list of reasons:

o Cost/time balance. Browser development can be done quickly without any cost. DirectX development is very difficult and arduous and requires a big team to do in any sensible size.
o My games are far more sophisticated than many commerical releases. They just don't have the graphics. So what?
o Browser-based games are easy to maintain and build upon. Software solutions require complicated update management systems.
o Grand Prix Tycoon can be played on anything from a Wii through to a mobile phone.
o I couldn't make it free. The cost of development and the time it would take would be far greater.
o Etc, etc. I can think of a few more but I'm too lazy to labour the point.

Class Listing

Categories (in bold) and classes on the table so far:

Karting

100cc Begineer (eg. Formula K100)
250cc Gearbox National [3 Max] (eg. Formula 250E)

Open Wheel

600cc Club (eg. Formula Jedi Class A)
1000cc Club (eg. Formula Jedi Class B)
1600cc International [1 Max] (eg. Formula Ford 1600)

Touring Car

Stock Open (eg. NASCAR)
Touring Open (eg. Dunlop British Touring Car Championship)
International Rally [1 Max] (eg. World Rally Championship)

V8 Open Wheel

Club V8 (eg. Renault World Series)
Pro Racing [3 Max] (eg. British F3 to Formula One)

Still not sure how to balance these as I know most players will be looking to join V8OW instantly. I was considering 'starter accounts' with an instant Club V8 drive but none of the tycoon features. There is also the issue of karting prices. The prices are so tiny, it won't work with the current system since the smallest increment is one thousand and changing the increment would make the prices in higher classes look a bit odd.

One potential solution might be to have a conversion when displaying on the screen so for a karting team it would show '3000' whilst for a Pro Racing team it would be '3k'. Another (which would also help balancing) is to use falsely increased costs for karting-level teams, but this would decrease the realism of the game.

Whichever route I take, the amount of teams you may have in any category will be limited.

Making use of motorsport

I have noticed many people talk about how they prefer A1GP because of the spectical it provides by giving people identical chassis. However, they remain unaware of the existance (or at least fun) of GP2 and, in some respects, F3.

A driver in motorsport has to work his way up the ladder. A true Grand Prix Tycoon would not begin at the top level either. By going through a plethora of karting classes, then moving up to professional motorsport, a Grand Prix Tycoon could grow (or not, as the case may be) before moving their team up to a higher league.

I was thinking a 'test' system. The car is converted to the new format, whether that's a higher class or a different car, and then pitted against a test race. If they pass, they move up to the new league. If they fail, they remain in the current league.

I want opinions. Should the game retain its focus on the 'RRA Pro League' or start the player in Karting and have them work their way up? Is it too much of a stretch to expect players to start so small?

It will, guaranteed, expand development times. However the end result could include so much more variety.

Rising popularity

I have done quite a lot of personal work trying to ensure Grand Prix Tycoon gets a fair amount of exposure. A google search for "Grand Prix Tycoon" brings up 194 entries, only two of which (the last two) are not based around Grand Prix Tycoon the game and that number is rising exponentially.

I know the site is getting more hits but I'm not seeing the effects of it. If you've found Grand Prix Tycoon recently, register on the forums and post or ask questions on the dev blog. I want suggestions and criticisms, so indulge me! The Quasit-Rushyo Games community don't bite (except Elle, but it's usually playful).

Decisions, decisions...

There are a number of decisions that I've recently had to address:

o How would the game be priced?

Given the rising exposure of the game, it's probably I could have gotten away with charging a monthly fee and it was considered. However, fundamentally I realise that many of the people who would like to play Grand Prix Tycoon will not have access to any form of funds regardless of whether they'd be prepared or not. So the question becomes: Do I sell the game to a small audience in order to pay for servers or do I continue to suffer large server debt and provide the game free to everyone?

The answer to an ethical decision like this would be obvious to a major corporation. To please shareholders and to ensure figures were met the company would gladly sell out. When it comes to Quasit-Rushyo Games however, we take ethical considerations as a foremost regard. Why? We don't suffer from shareholders (whose only concerns are their dividends) and are only beholden to ourselves. In that sense I have two duties to perform. To look after myself and to consider the moral ramifications of any action I take. The latter obviously urges me to release the game for free, but the former is important as well. Grand Prix Tycoon has placed (and increasing do so) a very tough strain on my financial resources. I am, after all, still a student with no work income.

So the decision to release the game for completely free was not an immediately obvious one to make, but one which I hope (and hope is the fundamental factor) will increase Grand Prix Tycoon's appeal and community.

o Will we include graphical representations of racing?

The original design document for GPT called for a game with no representation of racing. This decision has been reviewed recently.

You see, the engine I am using (which is bespoke and written from scratch, by the way) has no real-time capabilities. This is a limitation of making the game friendly for use in all types of browsers. Without a radical redesign, the game would not even be capable of anything vaguely real time and using something such as flash would be not only tacky but a great deal of undue effort.

However, the current race system works by considering events from lap to lap and using them to calculate overall race times and events. By splitting each lap up so they occur at certain intervals, a player could view the grid of a race lap-by-lap as it occurs. PHP's GD library is more than capable of creating static images representating the relative position of cars on a straight piece of track.

What does this add? Other than the excellent advertising factor it also allows players to get more involved in the races. Watching the race go on lap-by-lap whilst on a messenger with friends or gloating on the forum mid-race is possible. It increases the community factor of the game, something I'm always very keen to promote.

o Should I have player-created news content?

I have been considering letting players post their own news content, but couldn't decide how to implement it. I have decided to come up with two seperate player-driven news services. One for press releases that any team or supplier can make and a second for 'officially sanctioned' Grand Prix Tycoon reporters to use.

The first allows players to feel integrated into the world and adds to the believability of the game. The second not only adds to the believability of the game but is also a potential reward for the most active community members. If a player is dedicated to the game, in-game news reports are a perfect way to put their dedication to use both for their own personal writing enjoyment and for the purpose of improving the game.

What's in a name, hey?

A name is crucial in deciding how the design document continues and, therefore, the final product. Whilst many people (fairly) argue that a name should be left until the end of a document, I feel it reverberates throughout the design too much to be left out. So long as your name is sound, it will direct the course of the game’s priorities.

For example: Consider the name Formula One Manager. This has a variety of problems. First of all it breaks the golden rule: A product of that name already exists. Aside from the inevitable confusion that causes users, it could also lead to legal problems. Not good.

The very inclusion of the words ‘Formula One’ also pose a problem. The rights to Formula One games are dolled out by the FIA. Without those rights, stating the game as a Formula One product could appear to be in direct contention with the legal rights of whomever has those rights.

Finally, the word ‘Manager’ gives conotations of a management simulation. However, I had already decided by this stage that the game would be less management simulation and more competitive management and tycoon-style investing. Had I stuck with ‘Manager’, I would have created a justification for including things I didn’t want. “It’s called Formula One Manager, therefore I can justify going in-depth into research and development”. That is not a situation one wants to deliberately create in the design process.

Moving on, a name also gives prospective users an insight into the content of a game. A user expecting a hardcore F1 management game might be turned away by the lack of focus on team micromanagement. If the name had been, say, ‘Grand Prix Tycoon’, they would have already known to expect less team micromanagement and more $$$.

So what’s in a name? Legal issues aside, a name is a first impression. It creates a state of mind not just for a potential user but also for the game’s designer.

Designing a design for a design

Designing is one of the more accessible areas of game development. Everyone has their own ideas for would-be features that they’d like to see in a game. Almost everyone has at least one ‘hit idea’ stored away that if implemented would see a mainstream game’s sales increase by the millions. It is also one of the hardest areas of game development to master, since it requires you to not only design a game, but also design documents for a game which five programmers could take and come up with similar results from.

To give you an idea of how difficult this can get, the university at which I’m studying a degree in Computer Games Programming also has a course in Computer Games Design. Together they have drop out rates which are some of the highest in the university, simply due to their inherent difficulty (and of course the pathway leaders’ insane desires that their courses be up to an incredibly hard, and therefore more prestigous, standard).

What does it consist of? Anything you could possibly imagine needs to be written down happens here. Everything has to be planned for at this stage. What kind of information will the player enter? How will that be processed by the database? What structure will the database have? To what extent must the database be normalised? What is the most efficient method of doing x, y or z? What development environments will be used? What end-user environments will be used? These are a smattering of the questions that must be answered.

Normally with a QRGame, I take a very flexible approach. I write a basic design structure which will get the game into the beta stage, then I start to flesh it out with features. However, this has proven unsuitable due to the success of IPTwo. Using this strategy only serves to make the games appear inferior to IPTwo, reducing attention to the game and therefore seeing it sidelined before my original visions can come to fruition. Therefore in Grand Prix Tycoon I decided a strong design is crucial.

What is this then?

With the development of Grand Prix Tycoon, Quasit-Rushyo Games want to give you a look into the development of an online game using our unique methodology. In other words, you can read about me screaming and shouting at code, servers, technical support staff and the QRGames testing staff.