Week 11: Mafia Racer

PDF Download: Newsletter: Week 11

We’ve had a productive week here at PlayStation Ignite. Our “Social Racing” game is coming along nicely and we’ve been iterating on our controls and theme. Our story is this: the players are taking on the role of mafia hit men in the 1930’s competing against each other to make various hits around the city. Their targets are mutual Facebook friends, but they aren’t told directly who the target is from the beginning. Instead, they are given clues in the form of photos taken from their friends’ Facebook albums and they must figure out the correct target based on the content of those photos.  The targets are scattered around the map, and the first person to correctly identify the current target and drive to their location scores the hit and gets points for that round. Once a target is taken down, a new set of clues appears and the players start again. After 3 rounds, the player with the most points wins.

The idea behind using the social aspect is that knowing your friends well enough to recognize their photos will give you an advantage over other players. By using photos from friends’ albums, we want players to need to know more about their friends than just their face; they also need to know something about the kind of photos their friends take or places their friends have been.

In addition to the story, we’ve spent a lot of time iterating on the theme and visual style. Below are some of the looks we’ve been experimenting with:

Old_city

CaptureShaveen_cityui-test1

This week we’ve implemented all of the basic needs for gameplay; driving, skidding, photo playtest1PNGcollection, carrying out hits, scoring, and the end state. Since we had a minimum playable version, we conducted a playtest on Friday evening which provided a glut of useful information that we’ll be examining and incorporating into future versions during our final week. Currently we plan to conduct another playtest on Wednesday to determine if we’ve made the correct design decisions based on the previous playtest. playtest2

In our final week we will be polishing up our systems and finishing up the theming. Stay tuned as we move into our delivery phase, and start studying your friends’ photos for the edge you’ll need to win!

– Team PlayStation Ignite