What a great day for feedback!
@burninglights This is definitely more game than story, and old simulation games were very much an inspiration for me. How did you feel about / handle the start n park dilemma? That one was designed to be a harder choice, since agreeing kills your points for that race, but risking it risks a great deal.
I was ALL about those career modes and seeing them take steps back across so many franchises surprised me, but not as much as seeing so many indie sports games ignore it as well. So I am trying to create the kind of game I would have wanted to play.
The dice roll mechanic is pretty simple for the chaos that is NASCAR, but it is enough that some decisions are made not knowing the future, even on repeat playthroughs, which was important to me.
Being a fan of NASCAR and career modes, I’d love to hear anything you think is “missing.”
I opted to go for it, because I roleplayed a pretty young MC and in my head they had nothing to lose. In my first playthrough it worked out because I ended up being able to breakeven, the second one I think I ended up causing some damage but my team didn’t seem to be too pissed off with me. Also I wanted to play an MC who was a little reckless but usually delivered results… rather than the type who’d “bring the car back intact” (which I notice was one of the options—which was a pretty neat way of sorting out possible driver archetypes).
In my opinion, once the game gets a little longer, readers might end up thinking “okay the stakes are too high now I don’t want to fuck up my whole career with this stunt” and play it safe—but right now I have a feeling most people would wanna just max out the content and see what happens.
Seconding the comment on dice-rolling: I really loved it too! I felt it gave endless variety and some extra spice to the gameplay (made me want to run through it a couple extra times just to see if I could repeat or improve certain things) but I suspect once you have more of the game up, people might want a better sense of how certain skills are affecting their “random dice roll” results especially at the end of a season. I have some idea of how the skills affect the specific detailed scenes (e.g. I assume control and maybe composure?) when you’re trying to bump a car to pass, but not for the overall tally.
Nice! It’s actually possible for that decision to pretty much end your career. If your combined season points and owner reputation drop too low, you’ll wind up unemployed. To be fair, that takes poor performance AND disregarding owner wishes in back to back seasons.
The aggression/cautious slider occasionally affects available options as well as the occasional roll. For example, the final race of your rookie season can only be won by an aggressive driver, though they are also the only ones capable of the worst results.
As for wanting a sense of how rolls work, this does a decent job:
*set spoints + (((die_roll + strength) + (composure + reflexes)) + (perrace + 45))
Every race has a random die roll, and then adds in the attributes (which change per track. The one above is for the road courses). Perrace is a modifier that is affected by equipment quality (and sometimes knowledge tests from setup), and then a final modifier based on choices within the scene. Hopefully you appreciate the peak behind the curtain.
The next update will have a brief blurb on each track that gives narrative descriptions of what it takes to do well there. I only just learned how to do extra pages on the stats screen.
In general, composure, reflexes, control, and endurance are all roughly equally tested on the track. Strength is tested about half as often on the track, but also shows up off the track (fighting the veteran driver and some shop work options). Knowledge and charisma currently only show up off the track.
Ah got it!
Interesting that you chose to do a die_roll + (skills) calculation… I am thinking that as the skills are improved over time, this would mean that the die_roll starts mattering less and less! (Which actually may be a good thing!) Otherwise, if that isn’t the intention, I would expect that some sort of multiplier factor might make more sense.
I’m currently kicking the can down a mental road. I’d already decided that I am going to re-do a lot of the tests in the majors, since obviously difficulties will increase. Hopefully at that point I can add new tracks and give them more distinguishing variables as well as come up with a better system for random wrecks, wins, etc.
Sorry for the delay in responding to this. The biggest thing that immediately comes to mind for me that I haven’t seen in the demo would be rivalries between different manufacturers. “Win on Sunday, sell on Monday” was a huge part of the story of the development of stock car racing, not only affecting the effort that was put into building the cars themselves, but fan allegiances and even sometimes how drivers cooperated (or didn’t) on the track. I realize it will be a little tougher to work that in if you’re trying to avoid referencing real world trademarks, but seeing some form of it show up would be pretty cool.