Mowing Mayhem Planning & Research | Targeted Game Design

Over the next 5 weeks, I’ll be focusing on my latest Game Development assignment: to make a game that targets a very specific audience. In my last post, I talked about my brainstorming process for coming up with new game ideas leading up to my class presentation. Now I’m going to talk about how we are approaching the research and development phase for our chosen idea, a game that we are tentatively calling “Mowing Mayhem”.

Finn’s idea for our next project is heavily inspired by Sega arcade titles released on the Sega AM-2 Model 2 arcade board. We all felt that Finn’s idea had a real sense of direction: it’s targeted towards a specific group with its mechanics, but also focuses on evoking a sense of nostalgia in its audience. Mowing Mayhem is targeted towards fans of retro arcade games with time attack mechanics.

What’s the game?

We’re making a time attack, ride-on lawn mowing game, designed in the style of games like Daytona USA (1993), and Crazy Taxi (1999). You’ll play as a lunatic on a ride-on mower in a race against time to cut as much grass as you can before the clock runs out.

Our goal is to make a game that could be mistaken for a Sega arcade title of the 90s. That’s no mean feat, so we’ve put a huge amount of time into researching the techniques that game devs used, and the technological limitations they faced back then.

Modeling in the 90s

While wafer-thin, picture-perfect supermodels graced the stage of the runways of New York, some of the most terrifying representations of the human form graced the screens of Sega arcade machines across the world. The ’90s were a wild time for fashion and for video games.

One of my main roles on Mowing Mayhem is to model, rig, and animate the main character and NPCs. I remember being blown away by the sheer number of characters in Crazy Taxi, especially the way they’d dash to the side as you barreled through the streets on your way to your next fare. Crazy Taxi is a huge inspiration for this game - we really want to capture the frenetic feeling of racing against the clock, all while avoiding pedestrians and people's property. Crazy Taxi's NPC character models are pretty much lego characters by today’s standards of character design, but I want to make sure that if we’re going with this style, we stay true to our influences.

Characters in Crazy Taxi had thumbs!

Daytona’s pit crew was even more lego-like than Crazy Taxi’s NPCs.

Note the opposable thumbs and semi-realistic face textures! It’s hard to work out how these textures were created, but we think that photographs were sometimes used, crunched down to meet resolution limitations, and then painted over.

Similar techniques can be seen in titles released on other platforms around the same time. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater (1999) and Golden Eye (1997) both have that photo-mapped, horror inducing aspect to them. I hope to achieve a similar effect in Mowing Mayhem using a combination of super low-poly meshes (we’re talking 1000 triangles or fewer), hand-painted, crunched photo textures, and floating limbs.

This shit was groundbreaking.

pHotO reAliSM

“Floating limbs? What the hell does that mean?” I hear you say. To explain, we need to turn to a slightly more modern title: Grand Theft Auto 3 (2001). 

Grand Theft Auto and the floating limbs

We’ve left the nineties so we need to be careful: the jeans are baggy, boy bands are here, and video game characters are getting more and more realistic (in some ways more than others).

During my research, I was lucky enough to find some models that had been ripped from GTA 3. The ability to pull these assets into Maya and examine them up close has given me a real insight into how they produced animate-able models without modern mesh skinning. 

Before the explosion 

After 

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh

As you can see, characters in GTA 3 were modeled in pieces, mostly consisting of cylinders clipping through each other. I’m guessing this was to allow for the limbs to bend without the need for skinning the mesh to the skeleton. It’s almost like these characters were built like robots and textured like humans. Well, as close as they could get to humans with the rendering power they had at the time.

I’ve decided to take a similar approach when modeling characters for Mowing Mayhem. We want our suburban environment to feel alive with pedestrians which means we need to create at least a few different textures for our models. I plan on building a female and male base rig which we can customise with different textures. I’m starting blocking out the character's limbs with low poly cylinders, following GTA’s example. This process should be really fast, allowing for quick customisation, leaving me more time to create the various animations for the main character and NPCs.

I’ve also been doing some texture testing. A simple test was to take the UVs from the GTA character into Photoshop and smash my tutor’s face onto it to see the results.

Woody, forever immortalised as a Liberty City Prisoner (I'm sorry)

It’s important to note at this point, just how fucking terrifying this looks. These quick-and-dirty experiments have led me to conclude that I'll need to give each NPC a custom head mesh, just to help them feel unique. We'll be using photos as the base for our textures, so it's going to be important to make sure that we warp the geo to match the facial proportions, not the other way around, as in the above example.

As for rigging, some quick tests with the GTA models have proven that auto humanoid Maya rigs could be the way to go. We’re short on time, but we want as many NPCs as that time allows. If I don’t have to build custom rigs we’ll have more time to get the textures just right.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this look into our weird 90’s inspired, arcade-style lawn mowing game. Next week, I hope to have the main character built and sitting on his trusty steed John Deere. With that said, it’s time to crack a cold one and get cracking on these base meshes.