Finding My Drive
I’ve been having a lot of thoughts about cars. Now, I’m not a car person - I enjoy driving well enough, and I’m (begrudgingly) impressed when I see a Corvette or a Mustang on the road, but car culture just never really hooked me. Even in the realm of games, I’m usually unenthused by cars; I played the occasional Need for Speed or Burnout title growing up, but almost always because someone else was already playing and invited me to join. Not that I think this disinterest is any more remarkable than, say, my apathy towards celebrity drama or college football - I just want to emphasize that cars aren’t something I dedicate any significant time or energy to.
So why, then, do I find myself wanting to make a game about cars?
Here’s the pitch: contemporary society has collapsed, resources are scarce, and the world outside of a handful of walled settlements is incredibly hostile to human survival. Sure, that describes dozens of existing media, but this one’s unique - because it has cars. Pretty cool, right? I’m sure nobody’s ever thought of that before!
Obviously, I’m joking - not only has Mad Max existed as a film franchise for forty five years now, but it even got a standalone game, developed by the Swedish team Avalanche Studios Group (maybe best known for the Just Cause franchise) and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. Avalanche would go on to aid in the development of the sequel to iD’s Rage, another notable entry in the “post-apocalypse driving” sub-subgenre of games. It’s clearly a somewhat decently explored space, but I found myself drawn to it as I asked a question: “Wouldn’t it suck to live in that world as an Uber driver?”
That was hardly my starting point. Instead, that came one day as I was driving past some active road work; one side of the road was completely occupied by construction equipment, the driveable lane was largely torn up chunks of asphalt and gravel, and cars were guided by two rows of orange cones. I happened to be listening to the soundtrack to Supergiant’s Bastion (funny enough also published by Warner Bros.). Bastion’s songwriter and composer Darren Korb has described the game’s sound as “acoustic frontier trip hop,” and folksy guitar and other strings feature alongside drum machine-like percussion to create a really unique, coherent musical identity. It’s some really incredible stuff, as is the rest of Korb’s work, and I highly recommend you give Bastion a play. In that moment, the combination of the wrecked road and evocative music was like a lightning bolt to my brain, and I suddenly found myself wanting to make something, well, Mad Max-like.
But, as I’ve mentioned, these games already exist (though as AAA titles way beyond the scope of what I could do). While I do think there’s value as a learning developer in emulating existing concepts, I really wanted something at least a bit unique - ideally via some evocative thematic twist. Inspiration ultimately came from one of my partners. She drives for DoorDash, and one night as she was heading out to work I got to thinking about the modern-day gig economy, food delivery apps, and rideshares - boom. “Mad Max Uber driver” became a quick, punchy concept I could run by people, and the idea really tickled me.
The mechanical concept was a whole other matter. This obviously had to be a driving game prominently featuring point-to-point traversal, but beyond that the world was my oyster. Early on, I had a few solid ideas for what this idea could become, but I had the luxury of flexibility and didn’t need to commit to anything yet. There were a few elements that I was intent on trying, however.
The first of these was a system for modular vehicles. I knew the basics of how cars work - combustion engine, transmission, axle - but I got to wondering how many pieces of a car could be stripped away without making it completely useless. Plenty of cars on today’s market have fancy auxiliary systems layered on top of what’s considered standard, so surely there’s some that can be cut away, I thought. Some of these are obvious, like backup cameras; the removal of many others, like mirrors and seat belts, is a dubious prospect, but a car would still be operable without them (and in the context of a video game, safety is significantly less of a concern!). Then there’s a handful, such as power steering, that aren’t strictly necessary for driving but the absence of which would make it pretty damn hard. I also looked in the other direction for things that could be added to cars. This is a theoretically infinite list, but items mostly fell somewhere between armor plating and a spring-loaded jumping system on scales of both realism and tone.
Why was I so concerned with these various parts? I was envisioning a game where a fully intact vehicle was hard to come by. There’s a good number of driving-heavy contemporary sandbox-y games that incentivize players to use multiple vehicles, because either one has become damaged or another is perceived as better. I didn’t want that - I instead hoped to evoke the fantasy of a scrappy gearhead who really knew their way around vehicles. Rather than offering players a single binary choice each time they found a new car, I wanted to present them with a series of decisions, encouraging them to strip their find for the parts they wanted to tweak their existing car or potentially even cannibalize their old ride to fix up a diamond in the rough.
This system seemed complicated, but doable, and in my mind lent itself to an RPG of sorts - one where the player’s mechanical build was their vehicle, rather than their stats, armor, and weapons. While I was bouncing these ideas around, a friend of mine compared the concept to Twisted Metal meets Crazy Taxi. Overall, the concept was popular, and I knew that this core modular vehicle system could be tuned up or down in scope as needed to fit the systems around it. It also served as a very neat bridge into a number of other considerations - combat, economies, and simulationism, all of which I’ll be talking about in future updates.
