Go Car Go!

Recently Josh and I(Hunter) just released a game on the iPhone app store, Go Car Go.   The game focuses on players building cars out of different weight blocks and attaching an assortment of wheels onto these block with the hope that the car will drive itself through a 2d physics level.  There are 48 fun filled physics levels, the games awesome, check it out.

The games conception came about in an odd way.  Josh and I work from home for a mobile software design company called Caravan Interactive.  Late January, early February the company's work load was lower than expected due to whatever reasons, the point is there was lots of free time.  At the start of this lull I stumbled upon a genetic algorithm that evolved 2d cars and makes cars that travel farther and farther across terrain over multiple generations of evolution.  Josh and I watched hundreds of generations of cars evolve in this program, we placed bets on which car would travel farther, formalized theories on the best car attributes.  The one thing we couldn't do was make our own cars.

Development

That was the flame of inspiration for Go Car Go.  The next day we pitched a 2d physics car building game to our boss Adam.  We got a green light; two days to create a prototype of the gameplay.  We worked our asses off for those two days and made an incredible prototype.  A randomly generated level that the player could build a with a terribly inefficient joint system which made the hull wobble like a midget on stilts.  Adam was impressed and we got two weeks to make the game.

Developing the game was a smooth process of cutting features and iterating on areas that needed improvement.  Originally we came up with a great list of 'nice to have' content for our game.  We were planning on multiple terrain types:  slippery ice, high traction cement, volcanic rock.  Interactive objects that the player's car could knock down such as a pile of boxes or have a valley filled with marbles that a car would have to traverse over.  Perhaps a box of TNT that would blow a car to the next stage in the level.   Even a swinging pendulum that you would have to time just right to get past.  All those features didn't make the game.  Features that did make the final cut: three block types, three unique wheel types, challenge stars, and free build mode.

Cutting those features was a shame, however, it allowed us to focus our efforts and polish the core mechanics of the game.  Iteration is key to game design, and the car building interface was the gateway to the game.  Creating the simple "place a block, place a wheel, watch the car move" interface didn't take long to code, but making it feel right did.  We quickly learned that players would want to move blocks around that they had already placed, that they wanted predictive graphics to indicate what would happen if they let go of a block they were dragging along.  Then after lots of internal play testing there seemed to be a large disconnect between the car building and the car going through a level.  We fixed that by having the built car shrink into the level.

The game got finished in about three weeks .  My second game was finished, polished, and didn't look half bad for not having a dedicated artist on the team.  To advertise the game we spammed generic iPhone game review websites and exploited our friends.  Our friend Max Scoville hosts a show for a video game website called destructoid.  Here's the video that he plugged our game on.  Here's the video.  Also another friend, Miguel Vidaure, wrote a review for a site that he writes game reviews for.  Check it out 

- Hunter Francis