Finally Grand Prix Tycoon has been sent on general release. This was a game that I made with my good friend Robbie Woodhead almost a year ago. It’s a fairly ambitious project for a flash game where you have to manage a track racing team over a 15 week season. We had areas for Engineering, where you research new parts, Pit Crew where you train your pit team, the car where you equip car parts, the driver pool with various different drivers with different abilities and cost and finally the pit girls which effect your teams morale.
The game did take quite a while to make and from start to finish had a 10 week development schedule. Artistically it was quite a challenge as the sheer volume of artwork was pretty heavy, especially as there were 6 teams to choose from so each character/ team member /car had to have 6 different styles of livery. I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out, to get a game out with that amount of content in under 2 megs. That included all those characters and screens as well as animated car sequences, 2 mini games and 15 qualifying courses.
The game since release seems to have had a bit of a mixed reception, it has done really well in terms of plays, however there does seem to be more people who hate it rather than like it. I think there’s a few issues with the general game design. Firstly its probably a little bit too complex, there are quite a lot of screens to take in and some have quite a lot of information, especially the car parts screen which was a bit of a UI nightmare, trying to squeeze 5 different part types and all the associated info. The game is also slightly too repetitive, it basically follows the same pattern each week, tinker with parts, qualify, race, repeat.
The main race screen was a bit of a nightmare as you have to display a race pretty much all text based, we had a big job to try and convey what was actually happening to the user without actually seeing the race, it was meant to be a sim rather than them actually playing each week. It partly works but not quite as well as in racehorse tycoon which was the first game of this type that me and Robbie worked on. Grand Prix is almost hampered by the real-time aspect of updating each lap. We did have a fair bit of trouble trying to balance all the options in the game as there are literally so many variables being plugged into the engine to generate a lap time. The first run of the game we had cars doing lap times almost an hour apart ! Its still not quite right in the final game and you kind of feel slightly detached from the experience.
Overall though, its a highly polished piece of work which is incredibly detailed for a flash game. There’s plenty of things learnt from the game development as well, it started off as a game fairly similar to racehorse but ended up an entirely different game altogether.
Go and Play Gran Prix Tycoon.
