Neon Seoul: Outrun

Responsibilities

1. Prototyping (Unity)
2. Pitching & implementing new features and systems
3. UI/UX
4. Designing & balancing the scoring system.

Scoring System

The scoring system was at the core of the games design. It was what build retention and motivation in players. In the spirit of classic arcade games, getting a better highscore and climbing the leaderboards was a key motivation of our target group. To that effect, the scoring system had to be intuitive and promote high risk behaviour.
This was achieved through:

1. Banking the combo: A combo must by actively stopped by driving slower. If the player crashes during a combo, all points will be lost. This creates a risk/reward dynamic where the player constantly evaluates when they should bank their points and when they keep going. The longer the combo goes, the higher the score.
2. Near Miss: taking over other vehicles at close distance provides a small score increase that adds to the current score. This incentivises dangerous maneuvers instead of hugging the guardrails.
3. Speed: The higher the speed, the higher the score and combo. Makes sense, doesn't it?

UI | UX

As the studios only UI/UX Designer, I was responsible for every bit of UI in the game.
The UI had 3 major challenges:

1. The entire game was played without controller. Every interaction is gaze and leaning based
2. The UI in game should increase the sense of speed of the bike as the lack of resources meant we could not rely on fancy VFX. We achieved this by warping the HUD based on speed. This proved to be very effective in increasing readability while being in the flow state.
3. The UI must be easy to parse at high speeds. In order to make informed gameplay decisions (see 'Banking the combo'), it was crucial to know the current score and speed. Focusing on the UI is much more difficult and risky while driving at 400Km/h in dense traffic. Warping the HUD and bringing highly relevant info closer to the players focal point was highly effective.

The warped HUD helped solve most of our major challenges and was often mentioned in playtests in a very positive way.