Outrun Chase
An outrun themed, multiplayer, cross-platform, thrilling racing and shooting game
Created on 18th August 2020
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Outrun Chase
An outrun themed, multiplayer, cross-platform, thrilling racing and shooting game
The problem Outrun Chase solves
‘Outrun Chase’ classifies as an artistic, hyper-casual game which allows both Internet and LAN multiplayer and a single player experience.
The game fully targets the public demographic which likes to play online multiplayer games on their PCs and phones, which is currently the biggest market in games releasing in India and already used by foreign games like PUBG, Call of Duty, etc. But something that makes this game different from others is how there's very low wait time to start each game and how quick the matches are, hence, players can enjoy a short fast paced game with their friends without having to commit 30-40 minutes to it.
This sector of India’s market has an enormous amount of consumers but the amount of game developers in India is very less. We can direct some part of that revenue to remain inside India and make India more self-dependent in this sector. Otherwise we can do a free release and add other microtransactions in the game like player skins and other cosmetic modifications.
Outrun Chase can be released on open indie game stores for free or for a price for phones on Google Play Store and Apple App Store and for PC on Steam, itch.io and Gamejolt.
Challenges we ran into
- Phone optimisation: The biggest issue was to give a good retrowave themed experience to the user but that requires a lot of lighting which is an expensive operation. We went into using Godot as it supports 2 rendering backends one which works on all devices with some cost on the appearance and other on high-end devices. We made two builds and finetuned both of them to keep a good UX. The game supports crossplay between the 2 builds.
- Cross-platform multiplayer: We wanted to support as many platforms as possible and with research we landed up on using the Godot engine as it is a very lightweight game engine which supports a lot of platforms officially like Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, raspberry pi and can easily be compiled for a lot of other platforms using export templates made by the community.
- Consistent UI/Audio/Level design: The retro wave theme required us to use bright emissive colors but such a specific requirement with consistency is not solved by free assets, so we made all images/3D assets using Paint.net and Blender, this also helped avoiding any licensing issues.
- Engaging multiplayer: Good level design and mechanics are very important in engaging the players and making them interact with each other we went into detail into creating engaging levels with twists and turns and tested them thoroughly to check every nook and. Find the detailed explanation of level design of each level in the Report. Godot's high level multiplayer API was used to ensure a smooth multiplayer experience even on moderately lagging connections.