Our graphical game, Traffic Traversal, was a game largely built out of a concept and a mechanic. The gameplay goal of our project was to create a game that felt retro, but had inspiration from modern mobile gaming. The aesthetic of our game was inspired by old retro games, but the gameplay and mechanics are influenced by app games. The retro game that inspired our game’s design was ExciteBike, on the NES. This game inspired Traffic Traversal’s side scrolling design and the use of bit-art for the car and roads. The visual style of our game is also influenced by the mobile game Crossy Road, where the design of the road and cars are very similarly low res. Crossy Road also inspired the decision to used cars with primary colors as identifying features.We thought that by merging elements from both games we could make an interesting game that could connect to both audiences. Specifically for gameplay we chose to focus on using drag-and-drop method to move the cars and match them up. The mechanic of dragging and matching was intended to be very familiar to any potential players, since matching is present in many popular mobile games like Candy Crush, and dragging/swiping is present in games like Crossy Road.
Our game was designed to appeal to players in the Action, and Mastery categories. The game is simple in premise but there is a real challenge to avoiding the never ending onslaught of vehicles. This appeal to Action gamers because they can never let their guard down and relax due to the face paced nature of the game. For Mastery players, there are certain techniques to learn that challenge the player (such as dragging a car over the spawn section for a faster match). In addition, players interested in strategy will no doubt enjoy trying to find the most optimal way to match the cars. The game allows you barely enough time to think ahead and plan and Mastery gamers would enjoy that kind of gameplay.
Our game is different from the majority of Traffic games in the way that we handle player control. Most traffic games like, Crazy Taxi, have you pilot the main car and avoid traffic by precise movement and control. Our game subverts the traditional tropes of the genre by giving you no control whatsoever over the player car. The entire goal of our game is in fact, the opposite. Control is only given to move the traffic around the player car, and nothing else. The matching elements of our game are not as unique but they offer a fun level of difficulty beyond just ensuring the vehicles don’t collide with your own. One of the games themes is Control, and we made sure to echo the theme in the controls by creating this non-conventional method of movement.
We received good information on our playtest about overall enjoyment and difficulty. One of the main things we heard back for the early stages of the game is that the matching system was too complex. Initially we had the matching set up to work almost like the game Candy Crush, where you would have to form solid lines of similarly colored cars to get them to clear. We ran into issues when trying that due to confusion from testers. They were generally confused on why it was a traffic game if the main mechanic didn’t really echo the aesthetic. This was solved in the version we have now, by only matching pairs of cars as a way to avoid collision. By doing this, we were better able to align the gameplay towards the theme of our game. And additional issue solved by testing was the need for control specifications. Our click-and-drop matching method was inspired by mobile gaming, and works well with mouse and keyboard; however, with testing it was clear that the game is significantly harder using a laptop trackpad. We couldn’t find a good balance between, since slowing it down made it too easy for mouse and keyboard testers. So we eventually decided to specify that the game should be played with mouse and keyboard.
Overall making Traffic Traversal was a fun and informative process. I learned a lot from contrasting the retro aesthetics with the more modern gameplay mechanics. Class lectures were instrumental in figuring out how to appeal to Action/Mastery players. The idea of subverting expectations was crucial to structuring our game and how it deals with movement and player identity. And with the wealth of information received from testing, we were able to create an enjoyable game.
