NHRA Championship Drag Racing: Speed For All
Company: Team 6 Game Studio
Software: Unreal 4
Platform: PC, PS4, PS5, XBOX series X & S, XBOX One, Switch
Role: Game Designer
Released: 2022
NHRA Championship Drag Racing: Speed For All immerses you into the teams, tracks, tuning and strategies, strapping you into the driver’s seat in your ultimate quest to become the Champion.
The faithful recreation of the real NHRA tracks was one of the core pillars of this game, to be authentic to the actual sport and fans. This meant however, that after the initial research and information gathering phase for the tracks, the reliance on level design was severely reduced. Therefore I was brought into the Game Design team to help design and configure several gameplay systems, and communicate those in a clear concise manner to the development team, testing and iterating on those systems within the ever-growing time constraints.
Since the NHRA has such an enormous and dedicated fanbase, the challenge in designing gameplay systems was to be authentic but still entertaining and approachable, and within the scope of the project. Not an easy task, but made possible by the teamwork and brainstorming sessions in the design team. Since the experience of a drag race is incredibly fast and therefore rather short (in the top leagues under 4 seconds!) we put a heavier emphasis on the management systems around the racing, which would all work together to improving the player performance during the race, or advancing to the next league.
A peek into the gameplay…
Responsibilities:
- Designing, communicating, configuring, testing and iterating on several gameplay systems:
- Player onboarding and first time user experience
- Vehicle parts and part economy balancing
- Vehicle wear and tear, resulting into vehicle part failure
- Vehicle destruction and deformation
- Active gameplay (racing) cameras
- Research and translation of NHRA race rules and regulations to a set of active gameplay (racing) rules and outcomes
- Taking part in design brainstorming sessions and being a general team player
- Communicating with all involved departments to achieve the envisioned result
- General QA & configuration bug fixing
Check out more of the game on the official website!