Assignment Brief

This was a piece of group work done for a University Assignment. The team was made up of four designer and unlike other University assignments the team was allowed to pick the topic area for research. The assignment ran over two semesters and was student lead learning so after the topic was chosen, the direction of the project was guided by the team. The team decided to look into racing games, and the project titled 'Can pacing and gameplay analysis be used in the design of motor racing tracks?'.
During the early stages of the project the team read a number of articles about racing games before coming to the decision about the projects title and direction. Two articles which influenced the project the most are 'Elementary Games Design' by Ben Cousins and 'Pacing & Gameplay Analysis in Theory and Practise' by Filip Coulianos. The team decided to approach this assignment in a similar way, by breaking down a number of tracks in existing motor racing games and trying to break them apart into what makes the enjoyable for the player.
An Excel tool was created to break down video recordings the team made of ourselves racing around tracks from a specific game. This tool broke the track down into one minute segments and recorded what was felt to be the main pieces of information as the track. Some of these things include whether the track was a straight or corner, the cars speed, camber, track side hazards etc. From some of these pieces of data we calculated other relevant data such as the track distance.
The team broke down over 100tracks from the games: Race Driver Grid, Project Cars, Forza 4, Shift 2, Formula 1 2011 and Race Pro. I recorded and broke down the tracks from Race Driver Grid and Race Pro. Whilst the data was being inputted into the Excel sheet, a number of graphs were being created which showed the cars speed over the whole lap, the corners direction and type as well as a rough height map of the track. These were used to look for patterns in the data to try and create some guidelines which would help a designer when creating a track.
Once the team had completed all of the testing and a list of guidelines created for the tracks they tested. The data was looked at as a whole to see if any patterns could be seen across the different games. The team then came up with a list of guidelines which could be used for a number of different racing games. The team used the guidelines to create two tracks to test; one followed the guidelines exactly while the other had a 20% deviation.
Once the tracks were complete the team tested them on 60 different testers and used a mix of questionnaires and interviews with each tester to determine what they thought about the track and its different aspects. As this was going on the data received from the testers was being placed into another excel tool which produced some analysis and graphs to allow the team to see the results. I created the testing procedure and analysis tools while the team finished off the tracks before the testing started. Once the analysis was completed, the team wrote up the report about our findings.