To Bird or Not to Bird?

If you've played 'Mad Driver' (like me), you may already have come face to face with one of the more frustrating obstacles you'll have to deal with when playing the game: a bird, intent on getting rid of your precious points. Why does this animal seem intent on ruining your day? Why has it seemingly gone to war with you? What is the reason that this little kamikaze is even in the game?

To answer these questions (and many more), I'll have to explain how I designed 'Mad Driver'. 

The concept of 'Mad Driver' isn't that revolutionary: games that involve you dodging obstacles have been around since 'the newest console on the market' was the Atari 2600, and over the decades, many other consoles have had games with some variation on this concept. This doesn't mean that games which reuse a concept are bad, though. if that was true, games like 'Subway Surfers' wouldn't have been such a huge success. 

When it comes to games like this, the most important element is execution, how the game's various elements come together. Developers often do this by adding a twist (often using new elements) or by making the game look unique in comparison to others. What's important here though is that developers think properly about what they want to add and how this affects the gameplay.

Looking back at 'Mad Driver', a simple change I made was allowing the player to move across the screen in four directions, whilst most other games of this nature only allow you to move in two ('Frogger' only has you moving up or down). This had a variety of consequences. At first, the only obstacles I had were rocks on the road that the player would have to avoid, but that brought up a new question:

If the player can move in four directions, but all obstacles always come from the top, what's point of being able to move in four directions?

It's quite shocking to me that it took so long before I finally decided to tackle this problem, but I had a good idea in mind. My answer to the problem was a bird, which would come at the player from either the left or right of the screen and make him lose all his points. It's meant as an extra challenge: you now have to look at two axes throughout the game to avoid obstacles, and checking to your left and right becomes much harder as the rocks and signs near the road speed up. Not making it too hard, though, I made sure that getting hit only made you lose points and not lives, otherwise the player would be bombarded from all sides and die quickly. 

All of this shows that adding a change, even a small one, to your game can have lots of effects on how the game looks, feels or plays. Thus, it's important to think properly about how you want to design your game and what you want to add, because if you don't, you could end up ruining a perfectly fine game. So be careful!

Anyway, I hope this was an interesting read. Since 'Mad Driver' is still being developed, I'm going to add many more levels and possibly obstacles to the game, so if you have any suggestions, send me a message or write down your ideas in the comments. 

But that's all for today, thanks for reading!