This week, we started on the development of the Oval track to get all the team members familiar with developing in Unity. Jacob Belga played an important role in teaching the members on object placement, basic physics, rigidbodies, and attaching scripts to game objects.
The team had scheduled some calls over discord to discuss the foundational aspects of unity and what the vision of the first track should look like.
After the meeting and during the week, we developed a very foundational oval track
Next week, we should be starting on decorating the track and setting up our driver to drive around the track!
Our game is called “Grocery Run: Shopping Kart.” Grocery Run is a game a kin to Mario Kart and Forza Horizon Series.
Forza HorizonMario Kart
Remember when you were a child, and you used to ride the shopping carts through the grocery store, and ever wondered, “What if we can race these bad boys around the shop?” Then your wish is our command.
This game focuses of the racing game rather than the party game aspect of Mario Kart. We want to capture the vibrancy and the throwing ability from Mario Kart and the strategic part of Forza.
But why?
Our team are composed of beginner programmers and we are hoping to learn more how the game industry works and how the game development process is done.
During our meetings, we have discussed about what games we should have. We have settled down on something from Nintendo. Jake loves cars and we all love Mario Kart, we have decided we need to create something similar, but with a twist. Also for the lolz
So how will it work then?
Drivers will pilot their shopping carts around the stage and whoever gets the first place wins! Simple as that.
Food Mechanic
That seems to easy. We wanted to create a way to sabotage the enemies by creating distractions via throwing food at them. If the opponent manages to catch the food that was thrown, it will decrease the speed of them and makes them “heavier.” The food items all have different values for food. For example:
Chicken – 5
Apple – 1
Milk – 3
The limit of food “weight” is 10. That will overall reduce the speed of the car that they can only accelerate up to 65 mph. If you want to get rid of groceries from your cart, you would need to checkout.
Check Out Mechanic
Whenever you are encumbered with the grocery, you are able to get rid of these groceries via checking out. How do you do this? By passing the lap. Easy! But you would need to have money to checkout first, just like in real life. There’s gonna be a set price to get rid of the weight that you are carrying, and it will make your cart so much faster than before.
Items
We want to implement two different types of items
Food Type Items
Currency Based Items
Food Type Items
Food Type Items will have two different types. A positive effect food and negative effect food. Positive effect food will speed you up and it will help you win. Negative effect food will slow you down.
An example of positive effect food is sugar, rice and carb food. It will speed you up. It will give you a Sugar Rush.
An example of negative effect food is shown above in the Food Mechanic section.
Currency Based Items
Money based items will help you checkout and reduce weight when you are encumbered. There’s money and there’s coupons.
Money will allow you to checkout. You can save these up and it will allow you to become faster when you are encumbered.
Coupon will allow you to remove items early on before the lap or checkout. It will also allow you to make checking out cheaper, if cart is empty.
Level Design
We have decided that we should have multiple ways to go around the stage to finish the race. When you go to around to get money, sugar for Sugar Rush etc; You are able to speed up but it will take you on a longer path and have more than normal obstacles than usual. There are short routes that will be easier and it will have less items, and some obstacles.
Obstacles
The obstacles will be placed around the stages in a seeming random way. It will be predictable on where it will be and easy enough to avoid. It might slow you down but it will not be hard to notice it.
Grocery Run: Shopping Kart 