A few days out of submission, my endless runner Car Centric is in a decent spot. All of the mechanics are in place and functional. Several play testers have given feedback along the development cycle, each at different stages of the games’ production stage. After several reiterations and tweaking, the game feels good to play.
This last pass of developing the game, I have been focused on polishing the game feel. SFX, camera shake on damage, UI animations, as well as polishing the PS1 style design I originally set out for.
Gamefeel
My other projects that I have been the solo developer on have lacked in the design department. I have focused primarily on the development side of things and otherwise left to the last minute, large factors of game feel that add to a project. I wanted to change that on the hypercasual game, as a large selling point of these types of games are simple mechanically and allow for the design to shine.
Stepping back from the programming was a good break and allowed me to consider how the backend I built, would allow for polishes to be added by designers if this were a larger scoped project.
Because of the retro feel of the game, I prioritized things like UI flourishes, tactile feedback in Camera Shake on damage, and the soundscape that will fill the inherit empty space of a procedurally generated endless runner.
Assets / UI
Modeling 3D assets in something like Blender felt out of my depth in the current stage, so i settled on Voxel assets as they are quick to produce and low-cost for efficiency for my game. Something that I really wanted to stretch in the last few days was cleaning up the HUD to give it a more retro feel.
In that PS1 era, having dynamic UI elements was a classic and gave the game a arcade-type feel. For instance, Crash Bandicoot with the 3D items to mark the player’s stats.
This design is seared into my memory after hours of these style of games growing up. Recreating this effect, I wanted a dynamic 3D Object in the UI to give a mix of modern and retro feel.
Adding these animated items was as simple as setting a Render Target of the items active in the world and mapping the materials to use these active targets as textures. This does make a very slight hit in performance, but I felt was well worth it to further the overall feel of the game as the performance hit did not affect gameplay.
Further Polishing
Any last minute polishes are minor tweaks as more and more people see and play the game. I feel it is in a good spot and am very pleased I took the time and spent longer than I usually do trying to make assets and implement them in a thoughtful fashion.