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GAMES YOU'LL NEVER SEE PT2

posted at 07.53 on 22.03.10

ALEX-BLOG-RACER5

Another game that never went anywhere was one I worked up a demo of with a friend, outside of office hours. It was futuristic racer set in a living, breathing city sort of like Bladerunner. The really cool idea though, was that you’d use an editor to make your own city, sort of like the game SIM City; placing towers and shopping centers etc etc And then, you’d hop onto your hoverboard, and race through it.

The racing part of the game was slightly different to the usual run-of-the-mill racing game in that your vehicle, the hoverboard on which you ride only has enough power to keep you going fifteen to twenty seconds, but, the onboard power supply could be recharged by flying through ‘power surge’ hoops (think drive-thru refuelling). Other ‘stay-aloft’ strategies involved using the thermal updrafts around the taller buildings, using the slipstream of large airborne vehicles, or doing a Marty McFly and grabbing the tailgate of a vehicle and hanging on! The point to the design was, that it blended the speed and skill of a racing game with the tactical play of a strategy game; you really had to plan your way through the race, often pausing atop a mega-skyscraper and scanning the cityscape below looking for charge-up points or judging which tall buildings would give your craft the best up-draft.

The vehicle itself was a sort of cross between a hoverboard and a kite – I guess very much like the thing-a-mi-jig the Green Goblin rides.

Anyway, in the space of a Redbull-fuelled week me and the programmer, a guy called Sam, got the editor working quite nicely and I produced a variety of city tiles, futuristic sky vehicles and ground cars. But we never got round to doing much more than that before our dayjobs hit a particularly heavy load and we just never got time to take it any further. Which is a real shame, because I’ve always wanted a ‘free style’ game that allowed me to explore a BladeRunner type city. Perhaps the GTA guys might one day do a SciFi version of their crime-’em-up.