Since the cat is now out of the microwave about our next tutorial, here's my thoughts on making a racing game.

My job in this is to make the track, so I've been thinking a bit about how to go about that.. I always start these things by taking a step back and trying to get a wider perspective; what is racing about? Which part of it do we want to relate to?

Man-Machine? possibly... NFS has a lot of this 'build your ultimate pimp ride'
Sports? Part of it - somehow it doesn't really interest me, though...
Exploration? sortof - since the road is there it's not exactly unexplored
Travel, Voyage? Yeah, I like this... Driving off into the unknown, easy rider, strong mythology. Even if the road's been built it's still a personal exploration....

Ok. Some sort of travelling thingy... Lets take a look at our format... It's a double thingy: A Unity tutorial & a tech demo. Tech demo means flashy graphics. Since its a Unity tutorial, we want to keep the code simple. Not a simulation. We don't want to get dragged down into the precise handling characteristics of different cars. There's also entire teams that specialize in this field, so anything we do will probably suck by comparison.

Ok, we got something here... Personal journey, exploration (=>exotic), freedom, simple car model.... Outrun? I always liked that game... Could write an entire post on why that game is so great...

Ideally, a journey has a start and an end, but this is a bit problematic for us: We don't want to model 20km of highway. Most games do circular tracks - here's my thinking of why that works:

Human Psychology: We like to balance the known & the unknown. We like to be surprised and we like to feel reassured. We like to feel we get better at stuff. If you drive a long linear track, it takes a long time to learn it - each curve is different. If you have a circular track, in each race, you get to try all curves 3 times. You get better at them within a single game.
Asset production: If you drive 3 times round a circle, you only need to produce a third of the assets.

So we do a circular track that feels like open road. Light hearted. Easy to control. How do we get the personal part in? Cars aren't that personal. Let's make it an open sports car and put in a driver. You don't see him all that much, but just him being there adds a lot. Ideally, we could do the outrun girl that points her finger at you when someone else overtakes - gives a lot of empathy... That would be overkill, though so lets not do that.

Exporation we don't do (Outrun does this perfectly by letting you choose your route). Exotic... Hmm I'm from the north, so something southern. Mountains, palms, small houses, water (then we can also show of reflections). Sunny. How lucky I happen to be on holiday in Venice B-). We could call it postcard racer... Drive from one postcard to the next.

To maximize good looks, I think a storyboard would be helpful. A series of images with track highlights. I don't understand why this is not used more. Since the car handling isn't done yet, I can't really make the actual track... Might as well do the storyboards now.