Differential

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To the surprise of absolutely no-one, when I had to come up with a game of my own for university, I did something with Transformers. Because of course.

The idea behind this game actually originates in Pitchposting #2, so I’m not going to rehash the entire thought process here. I left off that post clearly stating that I didn’t have the time or knowledge to make a game; this assignment had me like, “wait, why can’t I just use this as an excuse to go back and realise that idea to some extent?” So I did!

It’s not a very good realisation of that idea, but I think it’s cute, so nyeh.

Before I decided to do a Transformers thing, I had a different idea involving glowing fish at the bottom of the ocean. You can find out about that here.

the pitch

As an extra step for this assignment, I was required to present a single-slide three-minute pitch explaining the premise of the game and its mechanics, including mockups. I went as ambitious as possible, while still sticking to the realm of plausibility. Somehow, I had the foresight to record my pitch, so you can listen to it yourself if you like!

TRANSCRIPT: [Lecturer asks if I’m ready.] Hi, yeah, I am. [Pause] Alright so when I was working on the artillery practical, I was like, this is really cool, but I kinda wish the tanks could just like… stand up, y’know? So I was also procrastinating at the time by playing a lot of Hill Climb Racing, and I was just kind of like, those two ideas came together into this, which is like, for legal purposes, totally distinct from any pre-existing converting automobile robot franchises. This is Differential, it’s totally different. But yeah, it starts out as a racing game, and then the gameplay transforms- I mean changes– into a platformer, so you can kind of like, have these two different sections, there’s the hill sections and the city sections. And the hills are like procedurally generated [with Perlin noise], but I’ll use like a consistent seed to make sure that it’s the same every time, and you can kinda get used to it. ‘Cause the idea is it’s kind of difficult to get through the whole thing, so you have to like, do multiple attempts and there’s like an overarching story that’s the same every time. So you can see on the top row how you start out in a scrapyard and you’re going through the hills, and that’s just kind of like a very physics-based racing game, but then when you arrive at the city, there’s like a traffic jam. So you kind of get stuck, and you have to like convert into your robot form and like jump around over the cars. And then obviously the police aren’t happy about that, so they rock up and they start shooting at you, and if you don’t get rid of them fast enough then they’ll call the military, so they have like helicopters that can like dodge your attacks. And then, yeah, if you kinda like, get past all that, you have to- you can also have to like scan a new car and like take that on as your form, because otherwise they just keep following you out of the city, they know what you look like. And once you get out of the city, you can get to like a gas station, and that gives you new, like, a new lot of fuel, which you can use to get through the next leg of the journey kind of thing. So there’s like a game loop that repeats, and then as you’re like in the hills you always hear over the radio like these beeps and boops, y’know, like Morse code, and you’re like wondering what it is. And the game’s just kind of this resource management where you’re trying to get through the hill sections super quickly so you’ve got enough fuel to use your blaster in the cities. And like, you can scan the helicopters and the military vehicles but they use fuel too quickly to be useful really. I mean, if you can work out like a good strategy then you get to like this final boss which is the hearse that drives up, and he has like an electric ground pound attack which you can like jump over or like use your tires to insulate. And if you hit him enough times you make it through, and you get to this space port, and you find a space shuttle, and it like boops at you, and it turns out you were talking to it over the radio the whole time? Whaaat? So yeah then you go into space, back to your home planet, and that’s the end of the game, you just get to like drive around in low gravity forever. [Lecturer says something like “Thank you for that window into your mind” and I laugh]

Believe it or not, the script I was paraphrasing as I presented was even more casual and slipshod than this. I had a lot to get through in three minutes and thought being conversational was best. The feedback just ended up being that I was probably being too ambitious, and indeed there were some features of the pitch that I never got around to implementing.

The titles I brainstormed before I hit upon Differential were:

• Automoboid
• Are We There Yet?
• Machine Man
• Automatic Transmission
• Switchgear
• Salt Man X
• 2WD
• Hybrid
• Alternator

I do this for most stories I make, and it’s always funny to me how much you can see the improvement start-to-finish. The final title is a component of a car that allows two wheels on the same axle to move at different speeds, which feels appropriate—and the substring “different” evokes the player character’s alien nature.

player’s guide

I was also required to submit a little walkthrough for the game and a recording of it in action. Having butted right up against the deadline, I ended up not taking this that seriously. For real, this and the gameplay demo above were just things I actually submitted for coursework.

wishlist

This thing is obviously pretty bare-bones as demos go. At the time, I was fairly confident I’d revisit it sometime and polish everything up more, add missing features, but there just aren’t enough hours in the day. Still, here’s a list of everything I’d like to add if I had all the time in the world:

• More sound effects, in particular engine and rotor noises!
• Tanks! Large, slow, ground-based vehicles which can deal massive single-shot damage.
• The final boss from my pitch! It turns into a hearse (inspired by “Tombstone” from Mark Weber’s Generation 3 pitch), and has an electric ground-pound attack, which the player can avoid by jumping or using their tyres.
• A chance for random cars in the traffic jams to also be robots, that transform and attack the player when shot or touched!
• The endless alien planet described in my pitch!
• More complex and varied animations and sprites!
  • A brief animation of the shuttle flying through space!
  • A variety of totally different car models to replace the recoloured ones I used!
  • More frames in the fire animations, and little explosions when things are first destroyed!
  • Helicopters that can face either direction, depending on how they’re moving!
• Better vehicle-mode movement! This is a little nebulous, but I’m not quite happy with how this aspect of the gameplay feels, so would like to tune it or rework it, in particular to let the car jump over hills. Really, it just doesn’t feel nearly enough like Hill Climb Racing, which uses much more complex physics.

Of course, all the (terrible) source code and assets are included with the download, so there’s nothing stopping you from modding the hell out of this thing yourself.

roll out

I think the commentary for this one being so short is a good indicator of why I’m not pursuing game development in my spare time: I love it, but it’s a lot of work to realise even very basic ideas. Still, I hope this demo’s entertained you, or at the very least whetted your appetite for a good game like this. Go play the Transformers DS game! It already exists!

Also yes, that is Dark of the Moon Shockwave’s crotch in the promo image, very astute of you to notice.