Rebuilding the Gameplay Meta in MixMob: Racer 1

Game Overview: Racer 1 is a lane runner where players collect energy and use cards to cross the finish line first. The game features deck building and customized robots (Mixbots), with unique gameplay attributes.

My role on the project started around a year into development. The principle design pitch was made to investors and active development with an overseas studio. The game's development had been slow so far, and it had not clicked with players. This didn't bother me in the slightest, I actually quite enjoy coming onto projects that are struggling to find the proper footing. Realignments and problem solving are one of the key disciplines of game design, after all.

Joining as the Lead Game Designer, I started to dig into the materials of the game and the roadmap. The more time I sank into our game, the more a fundamental problem cropped up:

Players had very little agency.

Alright let's do a quick recap. Player Agency is how much control the Player has over the outcome of the game. For example, Snakes and Ladders has zero player agency aside from the act of rolling the dice. The player must move the spaces they rolled, they cannot make any other decisions. In Snakes and Ladders, the player is along for the ride, and the dice gods will decide who wins! On the other hand, let's look at Poker. In Poker, the player has no control over their cards but they have a large amount of agency over how they use the secret information of their cards and make key decisions about what they want to do at every stage of the game. The social component of poker enhances this even further.

Racer 1 was built up to be a eSports title, tournaments were on the way. Without an overhaul, there was little chance that we'd succeed.

In Racer 1, users could slide left and right to avoid obstacles and collect energy. They would then use one of a set of cards that would deal damage, heal damage, or go faster.

Early gameplay of Mixmob: Racer1 from just before I joined the project.

Yet, the initial slate of cards didn't allow for a variety of gameplay styles. A 25 Damage Card costing 1 Energy is hardly different than a 50 Damage Card that costs 2 Energy. Sure, it's different, but not one that was going to change player behaviour.

Compounding this, attack cards automatically hit the opponent after a set amount of time. Positioning didn't change your decisions, and any offensive/defensive depth didn't exist.

As a racing title, we should be trying to ratchet up the tension as player battle out neck and neck to reach first place and cross the line.

Being damaged didn't matter until you were Knocked Out, and then once you were knocked out, it was about three seconds until you were up and running again. So dealing all this damage was to activate a 3 second delay to your opponent finishing. Conversely healing yourself prevented that three second delay.

All states in the race boiled down to a modifier to your speed, and the position on the track is an abstraction of your percentage complete.

Alright that's the bulk of my assessment of what was wrong, but what were the user's saying? We were building in the open. A discord with thousands of users. User surveys were sent out and we kept getting the same feedback:

"Why aren't you just making a kart racer?"

As some clever, probably handsome, person who reads game design blogs, I'm sure your reaction is somewhere in the ballpark of, "because that's a completely different game." You'd be right, but we kept getting this feedback. Something about the early players and investors wanted a Mario Kart or Crash Team Racing style experience.

Thankfully, prior to this, I worked on FIFA Mobile, where I was exposed to a lot of user feedback. For the positive or negative, it always came from a place of intense passion. Through this volume, I learned to try and take feedback one level deeper: it's often not the right path to react and implement feedback exactly as it's delivered, you need to understand the user's intentions.

What I took away from that feedback, coupled with my own assessments was we needed to rethink the character mechanics to better match the expectations of an eSports racer and give the player more decisions in the moment.

Instead of Attack cards that would automatically hit the target, I instead split them into several targeting types:

- Bombardment: Auto-hits anywhere on the map after a set amount of time. The defender has a small window of time to prepare for the hit through shielding, moving, or counterattacking.

- Homing: Launch a missile that travels toward the target, but the arrival time is differentiated by the player's relative positions.

- Directional: Attacks that follow the lane that they were launched from. These attacks can be dodged and can destroy obstacles on the track, giving them evasion risk but additional utility.

- Collision: Used to ram opponents within range.

Instead of all cards being a bombardment, we now had four types of targeting in play. From a gameplay meta, this meant players could plan out their attacks and counterplay. From a live service, we now had the potential to create exponentially more cards. A big win here was building the new targeting system on top of all the existing cards to reduce technical scope. We could also reuse most VFX and art while using budget sparingly on new options. I think being scrappy and reusing existing assets is probably a topic for another blog post too!

An example of some new cards that we were able to implement thanks to the new targeting types.

There was another big piece of gameplay updates in the form of attributes that we tackled later, but that's the topic of another design post-mortem later.

As usual, thank you for reading. This is part of my own memoir chronicling of my game design journey and hoping this can spark some of your own creative juices too.

Keep Playing, Keep Building.