There's a nice blog on the Gas website about how they make the game. They talk about the tracks and the cars and this nice section about adding the Air Strike to Mashed:
One of the all new features in Mashed was the Air Strike. We’d written quite a few same-screen multi-player race games when we started Mashed and whilst we’d honed the core multi-player experience quite a bit, there was still a problem that the weaker players could be left sitting watching for quite a while as they continually left the point early.
We wanted a mechanism to keep them involved, let them have some influence on the game, yet not ruin the core experience for the players left racing in the point.
Early in Mashed we had a feature whereby when a car was eliminated from a point and their ‘dead’ car was left on the track, they could hit a button to blow it up. If they timed this right they could take out their (still racing) opponents. This was really funny and (when it worked) worked really well. The main problem was there wasn’t an opportunity to do it very often. Only if you died whilst on track and only if the still racing opponents managed to keep going for a whole lap was it possible to use this feature, which in the end was hardly ever – a shame.
We wanted something that would keep the eliminated player’s involved all the time and so came up with the Air Strike. This allowed the eliminated player to move a cross-hair target over the racing cars, lock-on and then fire a homing missile. With a bit of balancing it worked pretty well. We had to make it just a bit difficult to lock on and then we had to ensure the racing cars could dodge and weave to shake off the subsequent homing missile. Make it too easy to blow up the racers and the whole game is ruined, make it too difficult and no one will bother trying. As with most things in games, it’s a case of getting the balance just right.
In GAS, we’re keeping this successful idea, but expanding it with a variety of air strikes. We’ll still have the Homing Missile, but we’ve got a whole load of new air-strikes too. These are all still work-in-progress, but we have high hopes that they’ll add something new.
As with all the features in GAS, we set them up in a way that we think is fun, but with our ‘Custom Battle’ mode, we let users include or exclude them and alter their properties. We’ll write about the hardcore feature that is ‘Custom Battle’ another time.
We wanted a mechanism to keep them involved, let them have some influence on the game, yet not ruin the core experience for the players left racing in the point.
Early in Mashed we had a feature whereby when a car was eliminated from a point and their ‘dead’ car was left on the track, they could hit a button to blow it up. If they timed this right they could take out their (still racing) opponents. This was really funny and (when it worked) worked really well. The main problem was there wasn’t an opportunity to do it very often. Only if you died whilst on track and only if the still racing opponents managed to keep going for a whole lap was it possible to use this feature, which in the end was hardly ever – a shame.
We wanted something that would keep the eliminated player’s involved all the time and so came up with the Air Strike. This allowed the eliminated player to move a cross-hair target over the racing cars, lock-on and then fire a homing missile. With a bit of balancing it worked pretty well. We had to make it just a bit difficult to lock on and then we had to ensure the racing cars could dodge and weave to shake off the subsequent homing missile. Make it too easy to blow up the racers and the whole game is ruined, make it too difficult and no one will bother trying. As with most things in games, it’s a case of getting the balance just right.
In GAS, we’re keeping this successful idea, but expanding it with a variety of air strikes. We’ll still have the Homing Missile, but we’ve got a whole load of new air-strikes too. These are all still work-in-progress, but we have high hopes that they’ll add something new.
As with all the features in GAS, we set them up in a way that we think is fun, but with our ‘Custom Battle’ mode, we let users include or exclude them and alter their properties. We’ll write about the hardcore feature that is ‘Custom Battle’ another time.
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