Project Description

• What kind of game are you planning to build?
• What are the goals of the game, how do players win, how do they lose?
• What are the interesting or unique aspects to your game?
• What are the list of features of your game? Prioritize them into at least three categories: "Must Have", "Would Be Really Nice", and "Cool But Only If Ahead Of Schedule".

We are going to build a third-person racing game, themed around office chairs (inspired by racing around in CSE basement chairs). It will be a pretty standard racing game: the winner will be the first to cross the finish line. We want to implement audience participation as a unique feature: our vision is that we’ll be able to point audience members towards a web URL during the demo of the game, and based on what the audience votes for, various nonsense will happen. (Some examples we came up with: the audience can vote to give a specific player a speed boost or a slowdown, or temporarily disable turning right, or reverse the direction that players need to go around the track.)

Must-Have Features

• [x] The general requirements for a game: graphics, server-client networking
• [x] Physics engine including collisions and 3D movement
• [x] Controls with intuitive and realistic-feeling acceleration, deceleration, turning, etc.
• [x] Lap and total timers, lap counter
• [x] Game loop: A win condition, and determining first, second, and third place racers
• [x] Audience participation site (can be a simple HTML form) with live voting and regularly-triggering audience events
• [x] Simple audience participation events
  • e.g. player in last place gets a speed boost, player in first place can’t move for a few seconds

Would Be Really Nice

• [x] Several different “models of chair” with different racing properties
  • Top speed, handling, acceleration, etc.
• [ ] Several different race tracks
• [ ] More complicated audience participation: messing with physics or game rules
  • e.g. friction is turned off, players have to drive the other way on the track
  • The audience activating level hazards