Neon Drag iteration

 


The Original Game


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UI was definitely not the focus of the original iteration, I wanted to get the game playable as soon as possible, this actually manifested not as a digital prototype but as a board game, where turns, not actual time was the main constraining factor. I generated a bunch of mazes and off to the races I went with testing.

In conjunction to this, I also spent a significant amount of time learning about maze building algorithms and was working on level generation rules while I was running tests.

After a number of tests, I had learned one very important thing, the pressure to use abilities in clever ways was working well in the turn based format, but not as much when I ported it over to the real time gameplay I desired. Something had to change about the gameplay, but I wasn’t certain which direction I was going to take the game.

In the end, after a bunch of conversations with peers, I decided that the original theme was a bit too obtuse for most and the real desired gameplay experience was a fast one with strategy elements, rather than a strategy game with a time pressure, for this reason I left the theming and complex resource management behind.

Mondrian Maze runner was an attempt to play to my strengths as a designer. A simple art style with a very strong theme, simple strait forward gameplay, and very expandable systems that provided a lot of depth of strategy and resource management. The core concept was a mobile game where players would traverse mazes against the clock, each maze completion would give them more time to continue their run. Along the route of the maze, multiple colored cubes could be collected both to be used in abilities along the run and for the meta progression systems outside of the maze running component of the game.

 
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The 2nd Attempt


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When looking back at the gameplay, I realized that the fundamental maze navigation was rather similar to top down racing games like death race (1976). I soon was looking at a lot of old school racing games to find interesting mechanics and contextualization. I didn’t entirely want to get rid of the management aspect of the game, however I did want to simplify it significantly. I added a track management element & vehicle maintenance to substitute for some of what I thought was missing from the original idea. As a last note, I should probably address the art choices made. As previously stated, my art skills are rather lacking, so rather than attempting to make art that was actually representational of what I wanted to create, I decided to go for something that was so outlandish and silly that it would both help people realize that it was not the intended art for the game and hopefully find the game endearing with its absurdly gimmicky theming.

 
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The Final Iteration


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I was still really unhappy with the game, I loved the idea of the retro inspiration, but the top down racing gameplay wasn’t working for me. It was slower and more difficult that I wanted out of the game. It was hectic, but not in the deliberate way I wanted it to be. Then I tried F-Zero for the first time and eveything changed. I had never played a racing game from that period that had that level of speed and precision. This in addition to all the iteration done on the previous ideas led me to what neon drag turned into.


 

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