BGP Post GGC Reflections: TwinShift

GGC is over (since quite some time), and everything has calmed down in terms of hand-ins and the like. Therefore, I wanted to write some kind of reflection on the project (TwinShift) as a whole.

I have some mixed feelings about TwinShift. When originally approached with the idea, I felt that it was an awesome idea for a game, and working with friends often means having a good time, and decided to join the group for a “final” project. As the weeks went by in the project, this feeling of there not being enough features or replayability in the game just grew and grew inside me. This feeling turned out to be true, which I realized at GGC when the only reason people came back to our game was to have their friends try it. While there may have been some small amount of people that played it again, the majority played one track, said “cool.”, and walked away.

However, when examining other racing games, they tend to be very poor in numbers of features. You drive, and that’s it. Most racing games, however, have some kind of interaction between the players, whether it’s the items and powerups in Mario Kart, or just regular bumping into each other (which games like Burnout have extended into their Takedown-mechanic), most racing games have some way of messing with the other players. We didn’t have anything of the kind. Even bumping into another player would destroy the both of you, which is just an all around negative experience, which doesn’t give anything other than sighs and annoyance. It also didn’t help that due to the speed of the game, and the lack of any kind of rubberbanding, players were incredibly spread around the track, and often wouldn’t see one another ever again.

We had planned to have some kinds of interactions, such as swapping onto another vehicle in order to crush them, but no one really ended up finishing it. Since it didn’t do anything, it was removed from the game for the GGC builds. There was also code for a highscore system, which would (potentially) indirect increase the competitiveness and replayability through “oh that guy beat my time? IT’S ON!”. This also didn’t work, and was hidden away for GGC. All of the half-finished stuff that we removed caused the game to have basically no competitive spirit whatsoever, which is kinda bad for a racing game.

I think that a majority of the problems with this project came from the fact that we did not have a leader or visionary for the project. We had one neat idea, which we assembled a group around, but no one wanted to take a leading role in order to push the project forward. While we did have a design document, it was only written as a “school assignment”, before it got hid away in the depths of our google drive, along with the production plan and scrum document, barely being looked at. This also meant that there was no enforcement of deadlines, causing everyone to end up just doing their own thing until they grew bored of it, which wasn’t neccesarily the thing that needed to be done at that moment.

There were some positive things with the project as well. I had a blast working with the team that I had, and loads of laughter was had. Since most of my work ended up being in the “new” Unity GUI system, I feel that I have quite a bit of knowledge with that as well, which may help with future projects. I also ended up creating some systems which I was happy with, at least at code level, such as the main menu, and generally, most of the systems we actually had in the game worked quite well (the only bug I can think of is the car randomly ending up upside down, which is cosmetic only).

The team has stated that they want to continue working on the project, but since two weeks have passed since the summer started and no one has done anything (to my knowledge), it feels like TwinShift has a very uncertain future.