Actual Driving Racing Post Mortem

Look How They Massacred My Boy 

I have to admit I feel a bit sheepish putting this post out. I know I said at the end of two of my previous posts I would get back to developing Actual Driving and finishing the Off Hand mechanic but sadly this is the end for Actual Driving's development, and I haven't put any more work into it. Ill get to why that is but first let's do Successes and Failures of the development cycle.

 Successes

  • Firstly I think it's a big success that I have developed a 3D game, there's not much gameplay to it but mechanically it feels pretty good to drive and you can explore an open world, not many other students can say they did that!
  • The artwork. I'm so happy with the graphics update, I have showed the game around a bit and everyone comments on it and how unique it looks.
  • I'm also pretty happy with the game design and concept. My first two games were a bit bland, mostly thinking up an interesting coat of paint to put over very generic gameplay. But Actual Driving is something special, maybe I shouldn't admit it but I wrote the Pitch post at something like 4 in the morning about 5 hours before my tutor said he would check the blogs to mark us off. Something happed in my sleep deprived state and I just had a spurt of creativity mixed with a general anger at the world you get when you're freaking out about assignments at that time of night. Everyone I have spoken with about the game has begged me to finish it off so they can play it. 

Failures
  • Again, much like my prior efforts time got away from me and I didn't end up anywhere near feature complete. I guess it's true that you really have to keep scope in mind when you're a one man team. Just getting the basic movement down has taken most of my time on every project including this one. 
  • Scope creep, this ties into the previous point but the game didn't have to be as ambitious as it was. if I just made it a simple racing game where you try to complete a circuit before time runs out or something like that the game might have actually finished. But I had to go and add features like giving the finger to other drivers and a whole point scoring system.

      
Now I said I would talk about why Actual Driving has had its Development cut short but Ill make that into another Post. Look out for answers in my first post about Assignment 3. I think I something else coming before that though. 

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