Developers diaries #18

We will keep on publishing our logs as before and, until the release of the game, new logs will be delivered to you every two weeks.

We will be talking about one of the most unobvious elements of the game – the balance of the car simulator. If we sum up the log, it will sound like this, “How you can make an interesting game from many loosely connected elements based on a traffic rule simulator.”

To start with, City Car Driving is an excellent meditative game. Support for traffic rules, reliable car physics and, thanks to the modding community, an almost endless selection of cars. Without innovations, the original CCD does not need game balance.

Our car simulator can entertain the player by itself, without intervention or additional modifiers. The original CCD is a set of various tests in car driving skills and a sandbox. But as we have said many times, “all of our ideas, except for a technical update, require a new game.” In CCD2, we bring together both approaches: players have an entire city to explore, and a set of tasks that can be completed in any order.

What does the game balance involve, besides the answer “the whole game,” we will try to explain it in detail and simply using three examples.

1. Each car has its own physics and technical characteristics. Accordingly, game tests should take this factor into account.

All tasks must be designed in such a way that some of them are universal and suitable for all types of cars, while the others are exclusive to the specific type of cars. At the same time, tasks for different types of cars should not overlap each other or block the progress of the game. On top of all this, a modifier is added as “maintaining the player’s interest.” Questions always arise: is it necessary? Is it interesting? How does it make trouble for us? All these issues need to be resolved, and there are always two approaches:

Qualitative: think through the entire system of tasks and cars, and then create a set of tasks that meets all the specified parameters. The advantages of this approach are that all tasks are different in their content and objectives set for the player, so such an abstract concept as “interest” will be evenly distributed throughout the game. The disadvantages are that each task must be thought out and always has several iterations in the game, and only one of them reaches the player. If this approach is followed, the amount of content in the game suffers greatly.

Quantitative: make all tasks averaged and identical in structure. The pros are that there is a lot of content for players, and the development is relatively simple. The cons are that we completely lose the “interest” indicator. The meditative process of the game, combined with such tasks, destroys the entire dynamics of the game.

Of course, we chose the quality approach – this is more interesting for us as a development team. We also believe that this approach will provide a unique experience for players.

2. The game has clearly defined balance parameters for the player: fines, cost of the car, cost of gasoline. All this also requires balancing. The main difficulty is that these are the parameters of the non-linear degree of the player’s losses, which entails an unpredictable result. The game designer and other developers, when testing the gameplay, can play CCD2 in such a way that there will be enough money for everything, but for other motorists, especially beginners, there may simply not be enough money for making progress because of fines. It appears to be the riskiest part of the game balance. In fact, if a player completely runs out of money, interest in the game will simply be lost, and in the worst case, it will be impossible to play. The solution to this problem for us can be achieved in three ways:

The first is early access, during which we will collect all feedback and constantly make adjustments to the balance.

The second is constantly playing CCD2 so that we know the game not only at the developer level, but also understand it as players.

The third is the basic income by default. A fixed amount determined by in-game events, during which the motorist will always receive money, which will allow “not to break the game at the end” due to poorly calculated maths. At the same time, we retain the classic system of spending and earning for a full simulation of the economy in the game world.

3. There are also parameters that are invisible to the player. For example, how does the weather change? Why after so much time, why here? Weather is very important in the car simulator because it directly affects the physics of the car. The car’s grip on the road before and during rain and on a completely dry surface will be different.

In the logs, we give only three examples, if you are interested in the topic of balance in City Car Driving 2.0 and in video games in general, ask questions! We will always be happy to answer all of them.

Why were there no logs a week ago? *We had New Year holidays, so we posted our New Year greetings and the Roadmap in advance – on the 29th. Today, we return to our standard schedule – releasing logs every two weeks. *

Why was this set of cars chosen and not: my favorite | popular | those that were before | created by modders? *Our answer: we understand the desire of every player to see their car in the game, or the one they like, and you have a desire to experience the emotions of driving such a car. Unfortunately, it is impossible to make a custom car for each player. Therefore, the choice of each car is, first of all, determined by the game: the setting, game mechanics and, of course, physics. *

Where is the gameplay, why are there only screenshots with graphics? *We stitch all the elements of the game together. We have many different segments working separately from each other, and we are currently testing and polishing every element of the game. Therefore, for example, screenshots with the city are a location. Some screenshots with mechanics are from the test site. As soon as we understand that we are ready to show the gameplay beautifully and completely, we will demonstrate it in the format of one of the logs. *

**Will it be possible to disable traffic rules, fines, revocation of the driver’s license, and so on? ** *In the first version of early access – no. However, after the game is released in early access, one of the first updates will be the addition of the Sandbox mode, where you can experiment with the game world at your own pace, including disabling traffic rules. *

What about the visual damage to the car? Will there be none at all? *In the future – there will be. This is one of the most interesting and priority tasks for our development team. *

**Will the game have a long-term end goal, or is it still free driving, but without the capability to customize the entire gameplay? ** *Yes, the game will have short and long term goals as you play through it. *

**Why was so little content created? ** Full-scale development takes a little over a year, and we have also mastered new technologies. The early access format will allow us to speed up the development of the project, reduce the response time to fix various bugs in the game, and also quickly implement game mechanics and other innovations proposed by the community.

Will there be a first-person view in early access Yes, there will. In the last log we made a mistake when writing the text, we meant “first-person view outside the car”. Thanks for noticing it.

**Will there be yard areas? ** Yes, there are few of them, but they are available. After the game is released in early access, we plan to expand the location so that there are more different road configurations. .

Next time, we’ll show you a selection of bugs and other rough points in the game. This is not a full-scale gameplay but rather interesting and sometimes funny material that we have collected during development.

Developers logs are published every two weeks. Don’t miss them!