Oddworld Cattle Race | Keyrian Bérard

November 4, 2024

3 weeks

Oddworld Cattle Race is a student project developed at Game Sup, where the constraints were a licence with a genre opposite to the main genre of the said licence. Our group therefore had to create a racing game in the Oddworld universe.

This project is unique because I was not the Lead Tech Designer, but rather a generalist. My two most important tasks were narrative design and user experience design. I also participated in system design, user interface implementation and, of course, game programming.

Technique

Among the features I programmed is a character customisation system. Before starting a race, you can customise different parts of your runner's body. There aren't many elements that can be modified, but the system is designed to make it easy to add new customisations.

To do this, we separated the different parts of the player's character's body. I then created a list of textures for each of these parts. Each list contains all the different textures for the body part to which it is linked.

All I had to do was create a function that defines the list index before applying the new texture when a button is pressed in the user interface.

This system can be easily modified to replace textures with 3D models.

User Experience

My most important job was designing the user experience. In racing games, it's important to feel the speed. Even if the player isn't actually going fast, they need to feel like they are.

So I asked for the camera's field of view to increase slightly in proportion to the player's speed. There also had to be a visual effect on the sides of the screen when the player was travelling at maximum speed.

I then coded the fact that the size of the visual effect of the reactors depends on the speed and direction in which the character is moving. Finally, controller vibrations depending on the character's speed are added to all this.