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.