Ares 2192 is an open world racing game set on a terraformed mars in the not too distant future. Players take on the role of outlaw racers who have hijacked vehicles previously meant for construction. Drop in, outrace your competitors, evade planetary security forces, and extract. The landscape of mars is varied and tumultuous: when dropping in players never quite know what the experience might hold and what the layout of the track is going to be. Players have to get creative in how they use their environment to come out on top.
My role on the team has primarily been as unreal expert and tech/systems designer. For the project, I am working with a bunch of folks who have been in AAA games for a while, so getting to learn from them and teach them a little about the indie experience has been very rewarding. It’s also been great to flex my design muscles again on something a little more kinetic. In the past a lot of the design work I have done has primarily revolved around resources and strategy, so getting to work on things like game feel and going fast has been a very unique and insightful experience for me.
Exploration
One of the core goals of the design has been to encourage player exploration. This has been a challenge. In a genre that is usually defined by mastery and optimization, encouraging players to venture off the beaten path or even disregard it entirely is proving to be an interesting design problem. We want players to feel a sense of freedom and the thrill of going fast while also not feeling bout by the constraints typically found in a racing game. Because of this almost all of our design energy has been put into making sure that the clear racing line is not always the dominant one without making victory feel arbitrary.
Environment
The other core goal of our design is to really focus on the spectacle of our environments. Driving around on a terraformed mars is not a very interesting prospect if it looks and feels just like earth. How do we build maps that are interesting to traverse and have clear possible paths, when the infrastructure of mars is not setup to be one big race track? As a team we have explored all sorts of solutions to these problems. We have played with gravity, lighting, and large weather hazards, all to drive home the point that racing in Ares isn’t the same experience you’ve gotten in other racing games.