Genie Driving Component

Start your Engines!

Put the pedal to the metal as you race, ride or even fly to victory in this configurable racing component we built for CBBC.

Brief

Building on the success of their ‘Genie’ games platform, CBBC were looking to add a racing game component that could be configured to fit a wide range of play styles. It would also be designed to facilitate easy rebranding, allowing CBBC teams to rapidly generate a range of new games based on the same underlying component.

Our Response

In order to make sure the component would be easy to ‘re-skin’ and play smoothly on older devices, we opted to go for a pseudo-3d classic arcade racer style, popularised by late 1980’s arcade games such as ‘Outrun’ from Sega, that could showcase extreme speeds!

We endeavoured to tread a good balance between maximising the amount of gameplay customisation available without adding a huge number of ‘toggles’, to keep the process of building a new version of the game straight-forward.

The Challenges

Optimising the pseudo-3d track rendering system to achieve the desired buttery frame-rates to make high-speed racing work, even on older devices, was a real challenge.

Getting the balance right for how much customisability to allow without over complicating it was tricky. We sought to group complimentary settings together in order to achieve this.

Designing a set of in-game achievements that would make sense regardless of the creative presentation of a particular iteration of the game, and were broad enough to suit a range of gameplay outcomes.

The Results

CBBC also asked us to design and deploy two different implementations for the game: ‘BMX Checkpoint Chasers’ and ‘Blue Peter Rally Racing’. Each of these featured a completely different visual style and presentation, with a different set of gameplay rules further highlighting the flexibility of the Driving Component underpinning it.

‘BMX Checkpoint Chasers’ features animated players pedalling BMX bikes across wildly rolling dirt tracks, chasing increasingly strict checkpoints to reach the next stage. Picking up collectables fills a boost bar that can be deployed to provide some super-fast pedalling!

‘Blue Peter Rally Racing’ features a full set of famous faces from Blue Peter as well as the king of speed himself from Top Gear: The Stig. This time players take part in competitive runs for first place against a track full of rivals as they snake through the Blue Peter Studio

The Genie Driving component represents a fully featured, customisable racing engine that can be easily set up to output everything from a checkpoint-based, rolling-hills BMX game to an indoor go-kart racing track through there Blur Peter studio in custom go-carts.

Boomerang – Paper Racers

Boomerang

View Project

CBBC – Creation Station

CBBC