Hex Rally Racers is a 3D arcade racing game for PC where players race on flying brooms through 6 wild twisting and turning tracks, combining ingredients to craft potions to be used against 7 other racers!
Game Director
As the game director, I was responsible for creating and communicating the game's vision to the entire team, as well as being the primary author of most official documentation, including the central game design document.
I managed and oversaw groups from every discipline during the entire development process, and worked with everyone on our 60 person team.
My communication and time management skills were put to the test, but the game turned out wonderfully, thanks to the effort of everyone on the team
I wanted to find a unique twist on arcade racers that would make our game stand out.
In my research I found that most titans of the arcade racing genre were dominated by three core pillars: speed, movement, and battle.
I also found that most great games focused on two of these pillars: Mario Kart focuses on unique movement and battle items, Hot Wheels focuses on pure speed and movement.
With that in mind, Hex Rally Racers focuses on speed and battle.
Witches riding on brooms certainly evokes a quick, zippy feel, and the unique spell crafting battle mechanic was a passion of mine from the beginning.
More on that below.
Systems Design Commentary
Systems Designer
As a systems designer on this project I was responsible for several areas of balance in the game, most notably balancing the different brooms to be competitive, yet distinct from one another, as well as working on the spell crafting battle mechanic.
Broom Balancing
I wanted each broom to have a unique identity that would appeal to different player types.
The blue broom has high handling and several defensive items, which appeals to cautious players.
The green broom has high acceleration and speed-boost items, which appeals to players that want to always be on the move.
Spell Crafting Battle
The battle item system is quite unique. Players can tactically choose to pick up "spell materials" and craft an item to use in the race.
Each broom has access to a specific set of items, which means the broom choice is all the more important.
This removed the random element of most battle systems, so the items had to be balanced to all be equally powerful, and place materials on the track so some items could be harder to make than others.
Retrospective
What Went Well
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Well organized and ambitious team: everyone was excited to throw in ideas about the project and make it their own.
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Quick content pipelines: our team was able to master the tools used on our project quickly, and could make a lot of content in a short period.
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Execution of vision: The development and communication skills of everyone on the team allowed us to make a beautiful game that had a strong vision from the start.
What Went Wrong
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Too many cooks: with such a large team, a lot of people had conflicting ideas, especially early on in the project.
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Large scope: The volume of content came at the cost of putting in extra time and stress that could have been avoided by scoping down early on.
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World Scale: creating such a fast game that also included flying brooms meant we needed a massive play space, which caused some performance issues in the latter weeks of development.
Even Better If
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Early public documentation: Getting as much information to the entire team as early as possible can only help with getting everyone moving in the right direction.
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Velocity Testing: Making sure to test how quickly we can make certain content pieces so we know how to best scope the entire project.
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Performance Limit testing: Performing tests early on as to what the engine can reasonably handle in terms of complex rendering can help set metrics as to how big the world space should be.