28 Jul 2020Developer post

Behind the Design: Weasel Raceway (Part 2)

Welcome back, designers! When we last left off , I had just finished laying down the groundwork for Weasel Raceway , both metaphorically (giving the weasels racing AI) and literally (the track). Of course, I still had a lot to do, so the only question now was… what’s next? Make o

Welcome back, designers! When we last left off, I had just finished laying down the groundwork for Weasel Raceway, both metaphorically (giving the weasels racing AI) and literally (the track). Of course, I still had a lot to do, so the only question now was… what’s next?

Make or Break Time

The track may have been done, and the player could run laps on it well enough, but it was still missing a few key components before it could be considered fully functional. These included:

A.) Some sort of “checkpoint” system to make sure the player is actually making full laps and not taking unintended shortcuts.
B.) A way for the AI racers to successfully navigate the course.
C.) Something that puts the racers back on the racetrack if they happen to fall off in any way.

The good news? All of these features are already part of the racer template game! The checkpoints are trigger volumes that span entire portions of track and are stored in a list - you have to drive through all the trigger volumes in order before crossing the finish line in order for it to register as a full lap. Meanwhile, AI racers navigate using a list of waypoints, already programmed to try and get as close to one waypoint as they can (with random variance built in so they don’t all follow the same exact line every time) before moving towards the next one in the list. Finally, more trigger volumes can be set up alongside the track or inside pits that, when entered, automatically teleport the player or AI back to a specific point, making sure no one gets too far off-road. All that said, while the systems were all already in place, it was still my job to customize them specifically for my racetrack. How did I make sure all my adjustments worked? By doing the single most important thing one can do when creating games…

Testing. Lots and lots of testing.

Sorry kids, you’ll still be doing a lot of tests even after you leave school.

Once I had finished my initial pass on placing down checkpoints, waypoints, and teleporters, I spent a lot of time playing through the game over and over, seeing where I needed to fine-tune things further. The checkpoints worked without a hitch, but it was the waypoints that proved to be a challenge. If you have too many, there’s little room for variance in how the AI moves through the course (not to mention bog down the game trying to keep track of them all). Too few, and you have the AI hitting walls and clipping corners due to trying to take too direct a path between waypoints. Plus, the position of the waypoints on the course itself is important: It may seem like the easiest solution is to always place them in the middle of the track, but that can result in the AI overshooting certain turns and slamming into walls (you generally want to put the waypoint on the inside of turns to prevent this). The only real way to see if you’ve placed the waypoints correctly is to play it over and over, stay as close to the AI racers as you can, and see what points on the track they seem to have issues navigating. Then, go edit the waypoints in that portion of the track and hop back in to see if they perform better with those changes. Rinse and repeat until your AI makes it through the entire track successfully.

As for the “whoops I fell off the track” teleporters, testing and adjusting them is a little different. You can’t really use the AI to test how effective they are since, ideally, they aren’t falling off the track that much (and if they are, you might wanna go back and check those waypoints again), so you’ll have to test them yourself by hopping over rails and messing up jumps at every available opportunity. The important thing when doing this kind of testing is to be incredibly thorough and not take any possibility for granted. Sure, you’ll want a teleporter underneath a jump in case the player doesn’t have enough speed to make it, but what if they make a sharp right turn in the middle of the jump? Or attempt to pull a u-turn as soon as they leave the ramp? And sure, you may have railings throughout the entire course that ordinarily can’t be jumped over, but if someone holds onto a boost power-up and uses it on the peak of a hill, will they get enough airtime to hop it then? It may sound silly to be worried about covering these edge cases - after all, who in their right mind would even try obviously bad ideas like that? - but something you learn quickly is that players love trying silly things just to see what happens. The more you’re prepared for it, the better.

The green boxes are the trigger volumes for the teleporter. Note the ones behind the hole racers jump out of on either side. They’re there because you can midair turn hard enough to reach them. Completely absurd? Yes. Will someone try it anyway? Also yes. Always be prepared, yo.

One last thing: When testing, always take into account not just everything a player could do, but every state the player can try it in. Remember how you can choose between a Lightweight, Middleweight, and Heavyweight racer? For the longest time, I was doing all my testing with the Middleweight racer, since that’s the “default” option. It wasn’t until I was testing out the various jumps on the course that it occurred to me to ask “wait a sec, Lightweight racers have a lower top-speed; will they have enough speed to make this jump that the Middleweight and Heavyweight racers have no problem with?” And it’s a good thing, too, because I quickly discovered that they could not, and I had to adjust the jump accordingly. This won’t always be an issue depending on what kind of game you’re creating, but if you give the player the option of altering their physics or stats in any way, make sure to test the game with all those options.

Made to Ruin

So the track is 100% complete and all the necessary bits to make it work are in place. At this point, the game is, from a technical perspective, “done.” It’s fully functional and playable from beginning to end. I could’ve called it here and just uploaded the game to the content portal as-is. But people don’t want to just play featureless tracks suspended in space; theming and decoration to bring things to life is a major component of any video game. Just because you don’t directly interact with it doesn’t make it any less important! So, with the track finalized, it was time to go in and make it look like a proper race through an ancient ruin.

Admittedly, giving a full “walkthrough” of how I did the backgrounds and scenery for the game feels kinda unnecessary, as the whole process can be pretty subjective and entirely dependent on your personal sense of creativity. Still, there’s at least a few pointers I can give:

Box Out Everything First - One of the first things you should always do is “box out” what scenery you want and where using basic shapes. Plop down featureless walls to mark out the size and shape of your buildings. Drop a huge cube where you want to eventually create a statue. It’ll all look pretty ugly at first, but the point of this is to explicitly lay out exactly what you eventually want to get around to doing. This will help you make sure there’s room for everything (can I have this wall here without it intersecting the track?) and figuring out what scale everything needs to be at (how large should this statue be if I want it to be the focal point of this room?). Plus, if it looks really hideous, it’ll stick out like a sore thumb you’ll be motivated to go back and replace it, reducing the risk of your janky placeholder assets accidentally making it into the final product.

Of course, every once in a while, everyone just falls in love with the placeholder asset so much that they keep it, like Kirby here. Yes, really.

Find Creative Alternative Uses for Assets - When deciding what assets to use in your game, it’s always good to remember: It doesn’t matter what the name says the asset is, but what your players think it is in-game. In other words, if you can’t find what you’re looking for in the asset library, try thinking outside the box and repurposing some other assets in different ways. When creating the garden area, I discovered there currently isn’t any dirt asset in the game I could use. However, from certain angles, the “moss covered rock” asset has a distinctly brown tint to it - clump enough of them together, and it makes for a good representation of a patch of soil! There aren’t any statues currently in the asset library, either, but any other asset can have a smart texture placed on them that lets you change their color completely. That Capitan Blackclaw statue? That really is Capitan Blackclaw, just with her animations turned off and her texture replaced with a gray one! Don’t feel limited to using assets solely for their “intended” purpose - as long as you can make it look like what you want, the actual objects used don’t matter.

Only Worry About What Your Players Can See - Every single asset that you add to your game increases the file size and load time of the entire package, which can result in a massive impact to overall performance. If you don’t want your players to have to wait five minutes to play a game that only runs at 15fps, you’ll want to be selective in just how many assets you use. A good rule of thumb: If your players can’t see it, you don’t need it. Got a building in the background that your player never gets close to? Don’t build the whole thing, just the front wall will do. Is your statue just floating in midair, but your player never sees the base of it (or lack thereof) in-game? Then don’t worry about it, just leave it floating! Your environments only need to look as complete as what your players can see. It may require some extensive playtesting to figure out exactly what you’re capable of catching a glimpse of in-game, but trust me, your graphics card will thank you for it.

From the Front: A majestic temple. From Behind: Uh… Where’s the back wall? Or foundations?

As long as you keep these three tips in mind, there really isn’t any right or wrong way to decorate your levels. Do you want to spend days putting in minute details in every aspect? Go for it. Do you prefer a more minimalistic approach that’s significantly quicker to put together? That’s fine, too! Any method is valid so long as you’re able to successfully capture the theming you’re aiming for. As for me, I felt just about ready to publish my game after finishing up the decorations. One final pass on optimization and playtesting later (I can’t stress this enough, you can never have too much playtesting), and I was uploading the game as you all have seen it to the Content Portal!

Conclusion
Okay, this article has gone on long enough and my editors are starting to cry silently in a corner over here. I hope you all enjoyed this brief(?) look into how I created Weasel Raceway, and that my insights and tips will help and inspire you as you create your own games. I’m looking forward to seeing what you guys come up with! Until then… Keep on creating!

Image Credits:
colleplanningtoday dot com, tvtropes dot org

Original post

22 Jul 2020Developer post

Behind the Design: Weasel Raceway (Part 1)

Greetings, designers! Recently we saw the release of a new game to the Endless Mission Content Portal: Weasel Raceway . This game takes the gameplay seen in the Racer, but swaps out the cars for weasels racing on foot and sets the action on a whole new track themed around a tropi

Greetings, designers! Recently we saw the release of a new game to the Endless Mission Content Portal: Weasel Raceway. This game takes the gameplay seen in the Racer, but swaps out the cars for weasels racing on foot and sets the action on a whole new track themed around a tropical temple.

Oh, and did I mention it’s a foot race? Those little buggers can run fast.

Now, what if I told you that I was the one who created this game? Totally awesome, right ~~(don’t answer that)~~? With the game out now, I decided it’d be cool to write up a little postmortem about this project. Where did the idea come from? What is my design process like? What challenges did I face while making this game, and how did I overcome them? How much of my blood was replaced with caffeine by the time I was done with this project? All these questions and more will be answered in this article!

It’s fine, I can stop at any time. Honest.

Humble Beginnings

Every game begins with an idea. They can be a specific game mechanic you want to work around or a thematic element or message you want to express or even just “hey, wouldn’t it look really goofy if we did this?” The main thing to remember with ideas, though, is that they can come from anywhere. Legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto has spoken at great length about this, citing how even the most random parts of everyday life have served as inspiration when creating games. Forging through the woods in his backyard as a kid? The kind of open-world exploration he wanted to capture when creating the original Legend of Zelda. A nasty encounter with an angry dog that was tied to a post? The inspiration for the behavior and attack patterns of the Chain Chomp enemies in the Mario games. Watching ants work together to move stuff around while gardening? The origin of Pikmin. Miyamoto has always had a knack for finding game ideas in the most unlikely places, and it’s a skill that any budding designer should take the time to develop.

Still no word on what kind of horrific childhood trauma led to him creating this, however.

That’s not to say that every game idea has to have some sort of esoteric origin story, however. Sometimes, the inspiration for a game can simply come from another game. This was the case for Weasel Raceway, as the idea for this game came from… watching a livestream my coworkers did for The Endless Mission.

How meta.

Watch on YouTube

Wait a sec… That punk on the right owes me five bucks!

The stream is very informative and worth a full viewing, of course, but for the sake of this article, the highlight is at the two hour, ten minute mark: While experimenting with putting different visuals on the race car AI, they decide to plop in the weasel enemy from the platformer game. The end result? Absolutely friggin’ hilarious. A cartoony rodent flailing around frantically as he runs way faster than he has any right to, the nitro exhaust while boosting being lined up perfectly with his armpits… It left the entire stream in stitches.

It was upon seeing this that I realized: There’s potential here. Why leave it as a single character option when this could be the basis for an entire game? Could the inherent hilarity of this be enough to carry a whole game by itself?

I had to find out.

Laying the Groundwork

So I had the basic idea: Racing game, but with weasels instead of cars. Now the big question was, where do I start? Well, we already have a built-in racing game template included with the game, and half of what made the idea so hilarious was that it involved swapping out models and literally nothing else so… why not just start with that?

Now, I know what some of you are already thinking: Isn’t that kinda cheating? I’m just taking the groundwork someone else laid out and using it for myself. Don’t “real” designers build everything from the ground up? And to this I say:

And speaking as both a designer and as someone who played Resident Evil 4, I can vouch that fighting the Regeneradors is less frightening than even the prospect of writing code.

Here’s the thing - There is zero shame in using someone else’s work as a starting point for your own. Video game designers will frequently reuse and share their resources so they don’t have to build everything from scratch every time. In fact, the entire point of game engines and game-making toolkits, from the Unreal Engine to Super Mario Maker, is to handle all the redundant busywork for designers so they can focus on the stuff that makes their creations unique. I could spend a month or two writing all the code necessary to even begin creating a racing game - avatar control, win/lose conditions, racing physics, AI behavior, etc. - or I could use the template that was already provided for anyone to use so I can instead spend my time creating new components that only my game will have. Why reinvent the wheel when I don’t have to?

Now, there are limits to this, of course. If someone hasn’t given you permission to use their stuff in your game, then yoinking it anyway is a pretty lousy thing to do (not to mention… ya know… usually illegal). Plus, sometimes it’s worth questioning the things that you’re borrowing to use in your game because they “have” to be there and this will save you time creating it yourself - trying to build a game without relying on an essential component of the genre can be a fascinating design challenge! But with all that said, if it’s an available resource for you to use that makes building your game easier, then there is nothing wrong or lazy about using it.

With that all out of the way… As I mentioned, The Endless Mission comes with a prebuilt racing game template for people to get started with. It has all the assets needed for a bare minimum racing game: Three selectable car types, a simple oval track (with boost pads), AI racers, power-ups, some basic sci-fi scenery, UI, and all the under-the-hood gameplay code needed for it to all work. Once I had this all out in my editor, I asked myself the first two questions anyone should ask when using prebuilt assets as a starting point:

“What components do I absolutely have to keep in order for the game to function the way I want it to?”

And

“What do I want to add or change to make this game uniquely my own?”

For the first question, I knew I wanted to keep the ability to select car types (even if they wouldn’t be “cars” per se), the AI racers, power-ups, UI, and code. As for the second, beyond the initial idea of swapping out cars for weasels, I wanted to create an original track for them to run around on and brand new scenery that would be more fitting for the weasels than flying ships and skyscrapers. The specifics of these answers would change over time (I discovered there were certain components of the UI I didn’t need to keep, and “new track and scenery” ended up being way more complex than it sounds), but this gave me the starting point I needed to begin working.

Swap and Go

Given that it was the initial inspiration for the whole thing, the first thing I did was get to work swapping out the cars for weasels. In the livestream, they only gave the player an option to be a weasel while leaving the AI cars alone, but I knew I wanted to go all-in here. Everyone is weasels now!

“You always give us the strangest requests…” - Our Graphics Design Team

There are three different kinds of cars that both the player and the AI can use: Lightweight, Heavyweight, and Balanced. Conveniently, there are three versions of the weasel enemy as well: Bully, Guard, and Rabid. Now it was just a matter of figuring out which weasel should represent which car type. Bullies are the “default” weasel type, so it made sense to make them the Balanced racer. Guards have huge helmets that make them tougher - that felt pretty Heavyweight-ish. Rabid weasels are quick and jittery-looking, so they fit right into the zippy, Lightweight car type. The racing game template was built so that each AI (and the player) stored the coded behavior and model they use in completely separate fields, so removing just the physical appearance of each car and replacing it with a weasel while keeping all the code untouched and still fully-functional, was a trivial affair. Within five minutes, I had an army of weasels running around an oval racetrack. That was quick! Building this game was going to be easy!

Tracking Progress

… Well, okay, maybe not that easy. Even with a powerful toolset like the Endless Mission, every game presents its own challenges while being created, and as a designer, it’s your job to tackle these challenges head-on.

For this game, the first challenge came in the form of the track itself. The Endless Mission currently uses a spline system for generating racetracks (that’s a fancy way of saying you can plot a line in the game world and the game will build a track for you that follows that line). However, while there are multiple texture/appearance options for tracks generated this way, they’re all sci-fi themed. I wanted something more akin to the tropical setting that the weasels are originally from, but to do that, I would have to forgo using the spline system entirely and instead use individual assets to craft the racetrack.

From scratch.

Piece by piece.

That highlighted asset? One asset out of nine that make up a single piece of custom-built track. There are seventy-five pieces like this that make up the entire track, and that’s not even counting ramps, boost pads, and the like.

It took a little while, but I was committed to the idea of making a custom track for this game. Thankfully, the use of grouping and saving my own assets locally helped out a lot here. Once I created one bit of track and saved it as a single asset, I could create as many copies of that as I liked to build the entire course. There were still plenty of challenges - making sure each piece of track lined up perfectly, realizing that I’d need to create a brand new type of track for something new I wanted to do, etc. - but once I had created enough assets, it felt a lot like a lot of track editors in older racing games where you plopped down track pieces one at a time to create a course.

Of course, this leads into the next question: What kind of course did I want to create? With the theme and the assets I was going with, the concept of racing through an ancient temple immediately sprang to mind. It’s a concept that’s seen many different interpretations in other racing games, so it would be fun to see what my own take on it could be.

If it’s good enough for both Mario Kart and Crash Team Racing, then it’s good enough for me.

That said, while I knew I wanted a track that would weave in and out of ruins, I decided to focus purely on the track first before worrying about any kind of buildings or props. Having the gameplay be fun and fair is a much higher priority than making sure the environment looks good, and it’s a lot easier to edit the theming to fit the track than it is to force the track to fit around the theming. As for how I designed the track, I just… built whatever came to mind. I had a few aspects I wanted to make sure were definitely included - the big jump at the very end was something I knew I had to have - but otherwise, I just experimented with whatever I thought would be an interesting piece of track to have next while making sure to not get too far away from the starting line (I’d have to make my way back there eventually, after all). I also considered what kind of interesting track elements I saw in other games that would fit well here - the series of 90 degree turns while going upward about halfway through the course is lifted directly from Papu’s Pyramid in Crash Team Racing, for instance.

It took some time, but after a whole lot of blood, sweat, and tears (well, okay, maybe just tears), I found myself looking at a fully crafted racetrack. That means it was time to start doing all the decorating, right? Well… Not quite.

Conclusion
Unfortunately, that’s all the time I have to ramble this week on the subject, but we’re far from done! Getting the track placed down is just the beginning of what I had to do to bring this game to life. Be sure to come back next week for the epic(?) finale!

Click here to read Part Two

--
Image Credits:
gifimage.net, mariowiki.com, knowyourmeme, thenintendovillage.com, Jungle Jim

Original post

13 May 2020Developer post

Patch Notes 5/13/20

We're back with a brand new update featuring some quality of life improvements throughout the game. Let us know in the comments or on Discord if you have any questions! ~ The Endlesss Mission Team NEW! User experience: Redid the main menu to transition directly into the Global me

We're back with a brand new update featuring some quality of life improvements throughout the game.

Let us know in the comments or on Discord if you have any questions!

~ The Endlesss Mission Team

NEW!

User experience:

Redid the main menu to transition directly into the Global menu after login.
We now have a First Time Editor Scene (only for new users) that covers the basics of editor camera navigation the first time you open the editor.
We have swapped over to using asset bundles, which results in a smaller build size!

Editor:

Clicking on an entity or component reference will now highlight the referenced entity in the hierarchy!
Added tool for object snapping.
Added tool to customize the editor camera speed. This is especially useful when working on larger levels!
Introducing the tag system! This is a massively improved way of browsing the library, designed to help you find the content you are looking for! Tags are searchable and combinable.
Code tabs! You can now open and edit multiple tabs at once!
Added SimpleHealthEventHelper to set up damage and healing via events without scripting.
3D text support! You can now quickly and easily drag in the "3D Text" object to your scene to add custom 3D text to your game. Choose font size, spacing options, etc!

IMPROVED!

Editor:

Cleaned up the inspector for Hackable Transform to take up less space depending on which options you are using.
Exposed several functions on Health controller for more accessibility to the event system.
Endless events now show the parameter name of the function you are calling, rather than a generic type name.
Endless event listeners can now be reordered properly and the remove button will always remove the last entry in the list.
Huge particle effect overhaul. Particle effects can now be previewed in the editor properly, including start, stop, and looping behaviors. As a result, we redid all the particles in the game, which may mean previous UGC games are now missing their effects, and need to be replaced. Check your games!
Updated editor tooltips for clarity, and added more tooltips to buttons that still needed them.

Optimization:

Massive optimizations to the Terminal scene, and the Platformer game assets. You should see increased performance in both areas!
Rework of the Adventure Mode camera system to allow for smoother Lens Mode target locking and de-locking!
Updated the hacking outline to be much more efficient resulting in large performance gains across the board!

Other:

Miscellaneous cleanup for asset consistency.
The intro can now be skipped immediately.

FIXED!

Fixed components sometimes not showing the enabled toggle when they should have been.
Fixed Racer avatar now respects "PlayerControlEnabled" correctly.
Fixed ALT + LMB will no longer deselect objects.
Fixed Sword Power Attack no longer gets stuck mid-swing.
Fixed an edge case with Ctrl + Z not always working.
Fixed the API calls for unfollowing a user or unvoting on a piece of content not firing correctly resulting in the action being canceled.
Fixed Object Mover: Ping Pong loop type now behaves as expected.
Fixed Racer End Screen now shows the best and worst lap time, even if you never finished the race.

Original post

03 Mar 2020Developer post

Patch Notes 3/3/20

We've got an exciting update for The Endless Mission heading your way right now! In addition to adding a HUGE amount of new props for you to use in your own games as well as adding a few games made by our development team, we also fixed a number of little things throughout the ga

We've got an exciting update for The Endless Mission heading your way right now! In addition to adding a HUGE amount of new props for you to use in your own games as well as adding a few games made by our development team, we also fixed a number of little things throughout the game.

Major Changes

Added 100 new RTS props to the editor
Unified the start menu and global menu into a single consistent experience by making all menu options consistent, accessible, and intuitive so that it's easier to navigate throughout the game.
Added support for World Space UI via the “SmartCanvasUi” script. Note: This reset existing font sizes in user games. If you have any custom UI in your games, you may need to set your font size again. Reach out to us if you have any questions!

New Games From the Development Team

Coin Pusher
Parkour Playground

Other Improvements

Fixed: Event Callbacks sometimes being deleted incorrectly when deleting a referenced object
Fixed: “Explosion with Damage” was not properly shutting off the damage after the explosion finished
Fixed: An issue with changing manipulation modes while dragging a gizmo
Fixed: An issue with instantiating Hierarchy references with a null parent
Updated: Editor now respects right control, right shift, and right alt
Updated: Timer Smart Condition to show proper value when not started yet
Fixed: Objects in the hierarchy will now properly grey out if a parent is disabled
Fixed: Alpha value now updates properly in the color picker.
Fixed: Lenses were mistakenly manipulating objects in local, instead of world position.
Fixed: Improper tooltip with on translation button
Fixed: Fixed objects being unable to be selected via the scene view after changing their transform in the hierarchy view
Improved: Controls for zooming, orbiting, and panning in the editor. Also added new cursors to indicate these states.
Fixed: Racer stats now properly set the health value on the racer.
Fixed: Hand jitter in adventure mode character!
Fixed: Issue causing some of the RTS unit visuals not showing up properly in levels
Fixed: Alt + RMB zooming on the Y-axis was unintentionally inverted
Fixed: An issue where dragging out an item while hierarchy had a search string entered could break the editor, requiring a reload.

Original post

07 Jan 2020Developer post

Design Challenge #2: Off to the Races!

We recently released the Racer in Dawn City as a free content update, so for our second design challenge, we thought: what better way to start the new year than to blow it all apart? In this challenge, you’re going to be taking the racer and mashing it up to make it your own! THE

21 Dec 2019Developer post

The Endless Mission and the History of Racing Games, Part 3

Okay folks, this is it! The final lap in our series on the history of racing games! Are you ready? That question was rhetorical, of course. I’m flooring it either way. We’ve already gone over the basic history of the genre, but now it’s time to shine a light on a very specific ki

Okay folks, this is it! The final lap in our series on the history of racing games! Are you ready?

That question was rhetorical, of course. I’m flooring it either way.

We’ve already gone over the basic history of the genre, but now it’s time to shine a light on a very specific kind of racing game. The Endless Mission is a game all about User Generated Content, and it’ll be no different when we introduce the Racer update. Thus, what better way to end this series than to spend some time looking at racing games that have made use of UGC in the past?

A quick disclaimer before we begin, however: There are a lot of racing games that let you customize your vehicle, usually by picking out car body, tires, paint job, etc. In some games, these customization options are purely cosmetic, but in others - racing sims in particular - these changes can have a huge impact on your vehicle’s performance. All that said, you’re still ultimately just choosing parts from a specific list to put on a predefined frame; it’s rarely as granular or in-depth as what most people picture when they think of games with a huge UGC element to them. As such, we won’t be highlighting games that “only” have vehicle customization of this kind in our list unless they do something particularly unique with it.

Besides, we need at least ONE article where we don’t bring up Mario Kart… Uh… Not counting this pic and caption, anyway.

Excitebike (1984)

Fun Fact: This game was actually a launch title for the NES. It just got overshadowed a bit by Super Mario Bros.

We’ve talked about this game a little bit in our previous series, but it’s worth looping back around to one more time. Coming out just one year after the release of Pinball Construction Set (the first game with UGC period, if you recall), Excitebike was the first racing game to contain UGC, in addition to being the first game to bring UGC to consoles. In addition to two side-scrolling racing modes (Time Trial and Vs. AI), players could create their own dirt bike tracks by placing down different track pieces in whatever order they saw fit. The track they created could then be used in either of the other two modes.

… Anyone else getting a hankering for some chocolate now? No? Just me? Okay, then…

Sadly, the NES had no way to save the tracks you created, so they were lost as soon as you powered it down. Still, this game was a huge first step in introducing UGC to the world of racing games. Excitebike’s legacy would not be forgotten either: Nintendo would bring back the franchise and it’s track editing features (this time with a save function) several times, most recently in cardboard form with Nintendo Labo’s Toy-Con Motorbike. It may not be an “official” Excitebike entry, but with customization both within the game and out, the influence is clearly there.

Wait, what’s our stance on UGC where the content is stuff you’re physically creating in the real world? This is getting meta, even for us.

Stunts/4D Sports Driving (1990)

“Shoot, I was a bit slow on the draw, can you back up and we’ll try again?” - The Cameraman

Released by Brøderbund in 1990, Stunts aka 4D Sports Driving (it was released under two different names) was one of the first 3D racing games to feature a track editor. You had the ability to not only create your own courses, but edit any of the ones already in the game as well. Even the terrain was editable, not just the track itself. It was also somewhat infamous for allowing you to add some truly wild track elements, such as loops and corkscrews.

Gotta love the yellow lines there - apparently, this is a two-way loop.

The game would be quite well-received, even showing up on a handful of “Best PC Games of All Time” lists, but sadly never got a true sequel. That said, it still paved away for many future racing games, including one particular series that we’ll be covering in just a bit.

Lego Racers (1999)

And just like that, the theme song is stuck in your head again.

As was mentioned before, a lot of racing games let you customize your vehicle, but it’s usually just swapping out different car parts that alter their performance and handling. It wasn’t until Lego Racers that car building got considerably more granular.

Befitting a Lego game, Lego Racers had you build both your driver and your car, brick by brick. You unlocked more pieces you could use in your creations as you defeated other racers in Circuit Mode, and the car editor was surprisingly thorough in what you could build.

If you have full control over how your car is built and you DON’T put giant lances on either side, what are you even doing with your life?

The way you built your car wasn’t entirely cosmetic, either - the number of bricks that your build contained determined how heavy your car was, which impacted its handling and off-road capabilities. Meanwhile, the sequel would go on to introduce the ability to damage vehicles as well, blowing bricks off with each hit. The more bricks your car had, the more hits you could take before you were reduced to running on foot to the next pit stop for repairs. Amusingly enough, while Lego Racers had lots of UGC content in the form of racers and cars, it did not have any sort of track editor; that was saved for a different Lego game, Lego Stunt Rally.

Lego Racers only got one sequel, but many people still have fond memories of the games to this day. Legos have returned to the world of racing recently thanks to some DLC content in Forza Horizon 4 - maybe a Lego Racers 3 isn’t too far away? We can only hope.

Well, I’M hoping for it, at least… Look, that game was my childhood, okay?

TrackMania (2003)

Well, look at that… A flying pig! Guess he heard about there being a new Half-Life game.

First released in 2003, the TrackMania series is the spiritual successor to Stunts/4D Sports Driving we mentioned earlier. Gameplay in TrackMania is quite different from most other racing games: Rather than racing to see who can cross the finish line first, you compete to see how many laps you can complete in a set amount of time. In fact, even when racing against other players online, there’s no way to interact with them - you’ll simply drive right through them if you attempt to ram them. It’s purely you vs. the track, and whoever is the fastest wins.

Time trials aside, the biggest draw of TrackMania has always been the track editor. There are very few restrictions imposed on you when building your tracks: So long as there’s a starting grid, a finish line, and some way to get from one to the other, you can build whatever else you want along the way using its very thorough toolset. Once you’re done, you can share your creations online from their community website, TMX. You can even import your own vehicles into the game and share them online as well.

Don’t look down. Or up. In fact, maybe just don’t look, period.

TrackMania has seen massive success ever since its original release, with each game in the series still receiving tons of new player-created tracks to this day. It’s even managed to gather multiple Guinness World Records, including “Biggest Online Race”, “Most Popular Online Racing Sim”, and “Largest Content Base of Any Racing Game.” Suffice to say, TrackMania is probably one of the most successful examples of UGC in a racing game.

https://youtu.be/v6fxsvQxV8g
Of course, why make a normal race track when you could just go full-on Fantasia with it? Yeah, that’s what I thought.

Trials HD (2009)

Excitebike’s younger, edgier brother

Trials is a 2.5D motorcycle trials game that originally started out as a series of online flash games. However, it would not see mainstream popularity until Trials HD debuted on the Xbox 360. Much like TrackMania, the challenge in this game isn’t from other racers (there wasn’t even multiplayer until later entries), but from the track itself - you have to reach the goal in one piece, surviving any number of devious obstacles along the way. There are even points where the game feels more like a platformer than a racer, with all the precise bunny-hops you have to do on your bike just to survive.

Seems safe!

In addition to being the first game in the franchise to really hit it big, Trials HD also introduced a track editor so players could create their own devious challenges with which to torment that poor motorbike rider. In fact, the devs themselves used this very same editor to create the campaign levels. The next entry in the series, Trials Evolution, expanded on the editor exponentially, allowing players to use the game’s visual programming language to really expand on what they could do. As a result, Trials Evolution’s editor has been used to recreate everything from Angry Birds to Minecraft! Suffice to say, Trials is an excellent example of just how in-depth UGC creation can be in a racing game.

It’s also an excellent example of just how bonkers an ARG can be, but that’s beside the point.

ModNation Racers (2010)

And you thought your vinyl figure collection was impressive…

Throughout the other entries in this article, we’ve seen UGC features for drivers, cars, and race tracks. However, none of them managed to feature all three of those into a single game… Until now. ModNation Races was Sony’s attempt to take the same “create anything” mentality used for platformers in LittleBigPlanet (which we covered in detail in the last series of articles) and apply it to racing games.

In addition to a robust single-player campaign and online multiplayer, ModNation Racers boasted in-depth editors for creating racers, vehicles, and courses. You could then use the PS3’s online features to share your creations with other users, and the devs would regularly host design contests and highlight content they found particularly impressive.

And you weren’t just limited to creating the track, either - the entire environment was fair game. Time to shamelessly port over every course from every other racing game ever!

Sadly, as a PS3 game in a world where the PS4 is a household name, it was only a matter of time before its online days were numbered. In October of 2018, the servers for ModNation Racers were shut down, making it no longer possible to share your creations or download the creations of others. Still, if you’re looking for a racing game where UGC can be applied anywhere and don’t mind having to keep it all to yourself, ModNation Racers is a good game to check out.

Conclusion

It’s been a wild ride, but it’s time to wave the checkered flag. From Space Race to Mario Kart to Forza, racing games have had a very storied history. Meanwhile, games like TrackMania and ModNation Racers have proven that UGC and racing games go together exceptionally well, and we are proud to be part of the next chapter in this combination of ideas.

In The Endless Mission, the sky isn’t the limit. It’s the starting point.

You won’t have to wait long to experience this next chapter for yourself - the Racer update is live in The Endless Mission right now! We can’t wait to see what you can come up with using these new assets, and what kind of mind-blowing creations you’ll share with the world. Thank you for joining us for our second history lesson, and we’ll see you out there on the racetrack!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/827880/The_Endless_Mission/

Image Sources: Reddit, IGN, Nintendo, Twitter, Wikipedia, Anandtech, Microsoft, Instant-Gaming, Gamereactor, Ubisoft, Giantbomb

Original post

19 Dec 2019Developer post

Start your engines: the Racer’s here!

We’re excited to announce that today we’ve released the first major update to The Endless Mission and it’s one you’ve been asking for: The Racer! And to celebrate, we’re offering 33% discount on The Endless Mission for a limited time. If you’ve played The Endless Mission at shows

10 Dec 2019Developer post

The Endless Mission and the History of Racing Games, Part 2

Welcome back, racers! When we last left off in our overview of racing games, Nintendo had just released Super Mario Kart, changing the landscape of racing games forever. And seascape. And skyscape. And… Racing games had been finding ways to vary themselves to stand out from the c

Welcome back, racers! When we last left off in our overview of racing games, Nintendo had just released Super Mario Kart, changing the landscape of racing games forever.

And seascape. And skyscape. And…

Racing games had been finding ways to vary themselves to stand out from the crowd long before Mario Kart came onto the scene, whether it was via unique vehicles (spaceships, snowboarding, roller skating) or gameplay elements (vehicle combat, non-linear tracks, platformer mechanics), but they were all generally content to just share the label of “racing game”. After Super Mario Kart, however, it became abundantly clear that the racing genre was splitting up into several distinct sub-genres, each starting to be championed by franchises rather than single games. For this article, we’ll be looking at each sub-genre independently, explaining what makes them unique and what games best exemplify their playstyles. Let’s ride!

Racing Simulators: Everything Except the Traffic Jams and Gas Prices

By the early 90s, video game technology had gotten advanced enough that developers could focus on not just making racing games, but realistic racing games. These games will take factors like friction, aerodynamics, and weather into consideration to make sure the vehicles behave as realistically as possible. They can even require you to keep track of things such as fuel levels or tire condition, with dire consequences if you don’t pull over to the pit stop to tend to these in time. As a general rule of thumb: In most other racing games, it’s usually assumed that you’ll keep your foot on the gas at all times and rarely, if ever, use the brakes. Try that in a racing sim, and expect to see your car flip over five seconds in and slam into a barrier in lovingly-rendered detail.

Which, to be fair, probably IS the appeal to some people.

These games, far more than the other racing sub-genres, also take pride in how how realistic they look as well, taking great pains to create photorealistic recreations of real world racetracks and working with automotive manufacturers directly to make sure that their cars are portrayed accurately in game. Because the focus on realism usually results in a notoriously high difficulty curve (and you often need quite a beefy PC to even run these kinds of games to begin with), racing sims tend to have a pretty niche audience compared to the other two major sub-genres, with one notable exception that we’ll get to in a moment.

We already discussed the first true racing simulation game last week with Geoff Crammond’s REVS, released in 1984. The first game to popularize it, however, was 1989’s Indianapolis 500: The Simulation, created by Papyrus Design Group. This game strived to be as accurate a recreation of the 1989 Indianapolis 500 race as possible at the time (right down to the same qualifying order as the real race), and any changes the player made to their car would noticeably alter its performance. This was the first game to really establish racing sims as being wholly unique from other kinds of racing games before Mario Kart would necessitate the need for sub-genres.

In 1991, the first racing sim on a console would appear in the form of Human Entertainment’s Fastest 1 for the Sega Genesis, while 1992 (the same year as good ol’ Super Mario Kart) saw Geoff Crammond back in the driver’s seat to create Formula One Grand Prix, which became popular enough that entire racing leagues emerged where people would compare their race times to other drivers. Meanwhile, Papyrus Design Group showed no signs of slowing down, releasing several additional racing sims during this time. Their biggest contribution would undoubtedly be NASCAR Racing in 1994, the first online racing game (of any sub-genre). The ability to actually race others across the globe ushered racing sims into a whole new era.

Any rumors regarding the true owner of Papyrus Design Group are, of course, completely unfounded.

In 1997, the Racing Sim world would be taken completely by storm with the arrival of Gran Turismo. Designed by Kazunori Yamauchi exclusively for the PlayStation console, it went on to become the best-selling game on the console and is still the highest-rated racing game of all time. Gran Turismo didn’t just prove that racing simulations could succeed on consoles, it proved that they could become mainstream, household names despite their notorious difficulty. Gran Turismo would go on to become a flagship franchise for the PlayStation, having a major release on almost every console they’ve made since and becoming PlayStation’s highest-selling exclusive franchise. It even managed to secure a Guinness World Record for the largest number of cars in a single racing game with 2013’s Gran Turismo 6 (1,237 total, for those curious).

No, that’s not a photograph. I was NOT joking when I said these games take pride in their realism.

There have been many other racing sims created since Gran Turismo, of course - the franchise is a PlayStation exclusive, after all, so folks on other platforms need to get their fix elsewhere. Notable examples include Papyrus’ (yes, them again) Grand Prix Legends in 1998, ISI’s rFactor in 2005, Kunos Simulazioni’s Assetto Corsa in 2010, and Slightly Mad Studios’ Project CARS in 2015.

Kart Racing: Where Road Rage is Encouraged

When Super Mario Kart launched, it inspired countless other games that sought to copy its unique formula. Most of these games were written off as “Mario Kart Clones” at first, but much in the same way that “Doom Clone” eventually gave way to the creation of the First-Person Shooter genre, these games too eventually inspired the less-dismissive label of the Kart Racer.

Now to be fair, even the new label of Kart Racer was a bit of a misnomer. These games don’t always have go-karts as their primary vehicles - even Mario Kart itself has since started including other options such as motorbikes and ATVs! The real key distinction for this sub-genre is the gameplay and presentation: Tracks are more akin to roller coasters than race courses, with obstacles far beyond the barriers on the sides of the track peppered throughout. Physics take a back seat to spectacle, and players get over-the-top items or weapons that they can use to actively hinder opponents rather than just trying to outrace them. Controls are usually simplified to gas/brakes, steering, using items, and some form of drifting for tight corners. In this genre, the in-game drivers are typically highlighted far more than the cars - you’re not racing in a Ferrari or a Porsche, you’re racing as Mario or Crash Bandicoot or Spongebob Squarepants (it probably goes without saying that this is a very popular genre for licensed properties). In short, kart racing focuses on chaotic fun, not realism or pure skill. This makes them very popular among both younger and casual gamers, as even the worst player is just one power-up away from pulling off a come-from-behind victory.

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” - Your Little Brother in 8th Place

As has been repeatedly established at this point, this specific sub-genre was officially kicked off by the release of Super Mario Kart in 1992, and the Mario Kart franchise has remained the reigning king of this kind of racing game ever since. Consistency and polish are their keys to success in this department: While each Mario Kart game brings something new to the table - 1996’s Mario Kart 64 was in full 3D, 2003’s Mario Kart: Double Dash!! put two characters in a single kart, 2008’s Mario Kart Wii introduced bikes and motion controls, etc. - at the end of the day, it’s still the same Mario Kart experience people come to expect, just with new characters, karts, and tracks. However, by keeping each release tied to a specific console (you’ll never see two new Mario Kart games on the same Nintendo system) as well as being… well… just that good, people are always more than happy to welcome the franchise like an old friend when it returns. This has resulted in every new entry in the franchise becoming one of, if not the, top-selling games on that system.

Many companies were quick to jump on the bandwagon after Nintendo’s success, and while none of them have ever matched Mario Kart in critical or commercial success, there’s nonetheless plenty of notable examples among them. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the first franchise to follow Mario’s footsteps was his old rival, Sonic the Hedgehog. Sonic Drift was released on the Game Gear in 1994, less than two years after Super Mario Kart. Sonic would go on to have probably the most varied kart racing history, dabbling with all sorts of different vehicles in a racing career almost as long as Mario’s: He’d race on foot in 1997’s Sonic R, use a hoverboard in 2006’s Sonic Riders, and swap between land, sea, and air vehicles on the fly in 2012’s Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed.

And to answer the question asked by every. Single. Reviewer: He races in a car as a handicap. If he raced on foot, it’d be unfair to everyone else.

Other fondly remembered games in this sub-genre include Diddy Kong Racing in 1997, and Crash Team Racing in 1999. Both of these games included a single-player adventure mode where, in between races, you could drive around an open world, interacting with other characters, partaking in side missions, and collecting various doo-dads to unlock new content. 1999 also saw the release of Lego Racers, while 2010 gave us ModNation Racers. Both of these games combined kart racing with something very near and dear to our hearts: User Generated Content. We’ll be coming back to these games in more detail next week, but they’re definitely worth noting now.

Arcade Racing: Don’t Call it a Comeback, We’ve Been Here the Whole Time

With racing sims focusing on realism at the expense of simplicity, and Mario Kart and its ilk fully embracing chaos and randomness, the racing games that had been here all along suddenly found themselves in a strange middle ground. They wanted to replicate the thrill of racing, but not worry about the minute details. They wanted to award skill over luck, but not have a high barrier of entry. These games opted to simply continue doing what they’ve always been doing and, thanks to their origins in the arcade, were given the moniker Arcade Racers.

Arcade Racers combine the pick-up-and-play nature of Kart Racers with the overall presentation of Racing Sims. The driving controls are usually a bit more involved than in Kart Racers (manual transmissions will almost always be an option, for instance), but the physics are far more forgiving than they would be in a Racing Sim - you’ll rarely ever spin out of control from taking a turn too hard, and concerns like tire wear or weather conditions are a non-issue. Courses tend to be set in more exotic locations than real-world racetracks, but never as wild as the ones seen in Kart Racers. The vehicles can be cars, both licensed or fictional, or something more fantastical such as motorboats (Midway’s Hydro Thunder) or spacecraft (Nintendo’s F-Zero). Power-ups that can assist you or hinder opponents can exist, but are almost never randomized, allowing for far more strategy and skill when using them.

As you might have gathered by now, there can be a lot of overlap between Arcade Racers and Kart Racers, meaning it can sometimes be hard to tell if a racing game qualifies for one sub-genre or another (Racing Sims adhering to reality so hard makes them far more self-contained). A good question to ask when trying to figure this out: How much luck is involved? In Arcade Racers, skill is highly favored, with the best overall driver usually being the winner, and randomness is rarely a factor. If weapons or power-ups are involved at all, they are accessible by the same players at the same time, meaning they can be planned ahead for and their threat minimized. Thus, if the answer to that question of randomness is “there’s very little”, then you’re probably looking at an Arcade Racer, regardless of presentation or platform.

The one on the left is an arcade game, but is actually a Kart Racer. The one on the right is a console game, but it’s really an Arcade Racer. Got it?

After the release of Super Mario Kart 1992, one of the first major Arcade Racers to come out was Sega’s Virtua Racing, released later in the same year. It wasn’t the first racing game to use 3D graphics (in addition to Plazmaline mentioned last week, there was also Namco’s Winning Run in 1998 and Atari’s Hard Drivin’ in 1989), but Virtua Racing was the first to really show what they could do for the racing genre, laying the foundations for future 3D racers.

In 1993, Namco would release Ridge Racer as a direct competitor to Virtua Racing, and 1994 would see the start of two more major Arcade Racer franchises: EA’s The Need for Speed and Midway’s Crusin’ USA. The former would even go on to become one of the top ten most successful video game series of all time, spawning over 20 games and even getting a film adaptation, of all things.

Which was also the source of this reaction image. Yes, really.

The late 90s and early 2000s saw many games of this sub-genre move to consoles. In the process, they also began experimenting with “free form” gameplay, where players weren’t confined to a single track but instead tasked with navigating an open world and hitting waypoints in a specific order faster than anyone else. Angel Studios’ Midtown Madness was the first game to introduce this concept on PCs in 1999, while they would eventually bring the same kind of gameplay to consoles in 2000 with Midnight Club: Street Racing. Microsoft would throw their hat in the ring with the Forza series starting in 2005. Forza is unique in that the franchise regularly alternates between both kinds of Arcade Racing styles: Forza Motorsport for track racing, and Forza Horizon for open-world racing.

Conclusion

And with that, our overview of the history of racing games is complete! From its origins as a surprisingly unsuccessful Atari game to the creation of three major sub-genres all with massive franchises, it’s certainly come a long way. However, we’re not quite done yet! There are a number of racing games that have experimented with user-generated content, a topic quite relevant to The Endless Mission. Next week, we’ll be looking at those specific games in far more detail to see how they directly inspired us when incorporating racing into our editor! Keep those engines revving - we’ll see you next week!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/827880/The_Endless_Mission/

Image Sources: knowyourmeme, mpamusement, gamespew, denofgeek, gran-turismo.com, weheartit, wallpaperflare, telegraph

Original post

03 Dec 2019Developer post

The Endless Mission and the History of Racing Games, Part 1

Hello, everyone! Guess who’s back! Did you all miss me? … Eh, I’m used to it. I get the same response when I go home for the holidays. With the Early Access release of The Endless Mission out in the wild, we’ve been hard at work getting ready for the first major content update we

Hello, everyone! Guess who’s back! Did you all miss me?

… Eh, I’m used to it. I get the same response when I go home for the holidays.

With the Early Access release of The Endless Mission out in the wild, we’ve been hard at work getting ready for the first major content update we’re bringing to the game later this month: The Racer! To that end, your favorite video game historian, responsible for the award-winning (citation needed) series on the history of UGC, has returned to provide another blog series, this time focused on the history of racing games! When did they start? What kinds of racing games exist? Have any racing games taken advantage of UGC in the past? Well, get in, buckle up, and plug in the AUX cord so you can start blasting the soundtrack from your favorite Mario Kart course at full volume, ‘cuz we’re about to rev up and find out!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMyFkraDzyY
Hot Take: This is the best Mario Kart song. Miss me with that Coconut Mall nonsense.

Space Race: The First Racing Game

This advertising flyer for the game is so 70s, my cargo pants turned into bellbottoms just looking at it.

So, just how much of a cornerstone are racing games to gaming as a whole? Try this fact on for size: Racing games are almost as old as the Video Game Industry itself. The very first racing game was Atari’s Space Race, released in 1973. This was only one year after their first release - and the first commercial video game, period - Pong. The gameplay was very simple: Two players raced to get from the bottom of the screen to the top first, all while avoiding asteroids along the way. Still, all the elements needed to constitute a racing game were there. Now, what with this being a brand new genre from the company that basically invented commercial video games, it was totally a smash hit, right?

Well… Er… No, actually. It bombed. It bombed hard.

Artist’s Rendition

As it turns out, people were still perfectly happy with just Pong. In addition to the original Pong, the market at the time was dominated by other companies just making Pong clones. No one felt the need to move onto the next big thing quite yet.

Still, even with things not going quite according to plan, Space Race’s impact on gaming cannot be denied - any and all racing games can trace their lineage back to this game. And for Atari’s part, they didn’t let this failure deter them from the genre at all: A year later, they would release Gran Trak 10, which was the first car racing game, along with being the first game to use a steering wheel controller.

The ad was still hilariously 70s, though. Don’t worry about that.

A Marathon of Firsts

With racing games having gotten their start so early in the history of video games, many early entries in the genre introduced new concepts that would become not just mainstays in racing games, but in video games as a whole. Let’s try to cover as many of those as we can, shall we?

In the same year that Atari put out Gran Trak 10 (1974), Taito put out Speed Race (not to be confused with Space Race). It was created by one Tomohiro Nishikado, the man who would go on to create one of the most famous arcade games of all time, Space Invaders. In fact, Nishikado has said in interviews that it’s this game, not Space Invaders, that he considers his favorite work! Like Gran Trak 10, Speed Race used a steering wheel controller, but it also brought its own firsts to the table: It was the first game ever to feature a scrolling background, and it was the first Japanese video game to get brought over to North America.

In 1975, Electra Games gave us Pace Car Pro, one of the very first video games with color graphics. It also allowed up to four players to compete at the same time, a step up from the two-player multiplayer that Space Race offered. 1976, meanwhile, brought in a lot of firsts. Taito was back at it again with Crashing Race, the first “racing” game that instead focused on vehicular combat rather than straight up racing. Sega gave us two racing games this year that broke ground: First was Road Race, which introduced a three-dimensional, third-person perspective to racing games, and second was Moto-Cross, a bike racing game that was the first game to have haptic feedback - the handlebar controls vibrated whenever you crashed. When it was brought to America it was rebranded as Fonz… Yes, as in Happy Days Fonz. Go figure.

Eeeeeeey…

1976 would also see the release of Atari’s Night Driver, the first racing game that used a first-person perspective. However, all of this would pale in comparison to one of the more… infamous legacies that was established that year, courtesy of Exidy’s Death Race. Death Race had gameplay much like Crashing Race, but instead of trying to slam into other cars, you were instead tasked with running down monsters to score points. Very humanoid looking monsters that let out a painful screech when hit and left behind a tombstone. This made Death Race the first video game to spark media controversy… Which, naturally, resulted in it becoming far more popular than it would’ve probably been otherwise. D’oh.

The first controversial video game, and certainly not the last.

Racing games entered the 80s in a big way with Namco’s Rally-X, the very first game to feature background music. It also had scrolling in multiple directions (although Atari’s Super Bug did that first in 1977) and an on-screen radar for keeping track of opponents. Meanwhile, 1982 would bring us “The Big One”: Pole Position. In addition to being the first racing game to feature a real-life track (Japan’s Fuji Speedway), this Namco classic was the highest-grossing arcade game in 1983 and would go on to be a massive influence on all racing games that would come after.

If Space Race invented racing games, this vibrantly colored classic defined it.

1984 was a BIG year for racing games (and dystopian novels, but that’s neither here nor there). This year saw the release of Plazmaline by Technosoft, a space racing game that’s considered the first game to use 3D polygon graphics, as well as Nintendo’s Excitebike, the first racing game with a track editor (yes, we’ll be getting back to this one and how it ties into UGC as a whole in a later article, don’t you worry). Additionally, up until this point, most racing games were not particularly realistic due to system limitations at the time. However, this would change with the release of Geoff Crammond’s REVS, the first racing simulation game that focused on providing a racing experience similar to real life. This would be the beginning of racing games branching off and settling into specific sub-genres, something that we’ll get into more next time.

And Now, For The Most Obvious Entry In This Article

It’s-a me! The game you were all thinking of when you first started reading this!

By the mid-80s, most of the major conventions of the racing genre had been established, with new games simply using better technology to improve on the concepts that came before. However, in 1992, those crazy folks over at Nintendo would completely revolutionize racing games with the release of Super Mario Kart. Until this point, most racing games were either “arcade” racing that focused on fun, or “simulation” racing that focused on realism. Furthermore, very few, if any, racing games put much thought into the people actually doing the racing - it was just you the player and a bunch of generic racing dudes.

Well, Super Mario Kart would say “Phooey!” to all that. In this game, you could play as one of eight different Mario characters, each with their own unique playstyle and personality on full display. While arcade racers already put being fun over being realistic, Super Mario Kart rejected any semblance of realism and instead fully embraced an overtly cartoony style of racing, with hopping, drifting, and dodging all sorts of obstacles across many fantastical tracks. It also introduced a heavy amount of randomness and emergent gameplay unseen in racing games previously. Before in racing games, victory would almost always go to whoever was the most skilled at the game. Now, with the help of randomized power-ups, anyone could pull off an underdog victory and come out on top.

I swear to Miyamoto, if you even so much as LOOK at me with that Red Shell…

Super Mario Kart would go on to achieve massive critical and commercial success, becoming the 4th best selling Super Nintendo Entertainment System game and appearing on countless “Greatest Games of All Time” lists. Mario Kart would quickly become a flagship series for Nintendo, seeing a major release on virtually every Nintendo system that has come since. Even beyond that, however, Super Mario Kart would kickstart one of the biggest subgenres of racing games - The Kart Racer - with many, many other companies jumping on board making their own takes on the concept. Most would fade to obscurity, but a few would rise through the ranks and become equally memorable in their own right. Even so, the Mario Kart series remains one of the best examples of this kind of racing game thanks to its high-quality polish and charming personality.

And hilarious memes. Can’t forget those.

Conclusion

We’ve only made it to the early 90s in our overview of the racing genre, but with how much Super Mario Kart changed the game, this is as good a spot as any for an intermission. Now that all the groundwork and genre conventions have been laid, racing games from here on out become less about innovation and more about perfecting what’s already there. Come back next week for lap 2 of our series, where the sub-genres get solidified and major franchises start coming out in full force. See you then!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/827880/The_Endless_Mission/

Image Sources: GIPHY, Wikipedia, Fandom.com, Kotaku, Indietronews, mobygames, techcrunch, knowyourmeme

Original post

11 Jul 2019Developer post

Introducing the Voice Cast of The Endless Mission!

We're excited to introduce the voice actors for The Endless Mission, a sandbox style creation game where a rich narrative leads players through a world unlike any other. Having previously made their mark on iconic franchises like Mass Effect, Halo, Dragon Age, Assassin’s Creed, D

10 Jul 2019Developer post

The Endless Mission and the History of UGC, Part 7

Well, here we are. The final article of this series. It’s been quite a journey - we laughed, we cried, we had a heartfelt montage set to a song by Phil Collins. Over the past few weeks, we’ve been looking at the history of User Generated Content and all the myriad ways that it pr

Well, here we are. The final article of this series. It’s been quite a journey - we laughed, we cried, we had a heartfelt montage set to a song by Phil Collins. Over the past few weeks, we’ve been looking at the history of User Generated Content and all the myriad ways that it presents itself in video games, from level editors to full-blown game creation kits. UGC has come a long way since 1983’s Pinball Construction Set, with each game and piece of software building on everything that came before it. For our final article in this series, however, we will be looking forward instead of back. It’s time to see what kind of changes and innovations are in store for UGC in the future.

… And by “the future” we, of course, mean “The Endless Mission”.

Pictured: Our Marketing Team, excited that we’re finally talking about OUR game for a change

You Gotta Walk Before You Can Run (And The Endless Mission Lets You Do Both)

A lot of games with UGC features in the past came with limitations: In Super Mario Maker, you’re making levels specifically in the Super Mario template. Whatever you create in Halo 3’s Forge will always be used in the context of a multiplayer FPS. This is great for folks who are just starting out, as all the framework has been laid out for them, so they can focus solely on one or two aspects. You don’t have to know how to code up a fighting game just to make stages in Super Smash Bros. However, this also means that you can never expand beyond these limitations - no amount of creativity or ingenuity will let you make a racing game in Rollercoaster Tycoon (no, the go-kart track doesn’t count). Meanwhile, other UGC-heavy software goes in the complete opposite direction, tossing you into the deep end with no way to scale back. Sure, RPG Maker will let you build an RPG from the ground-up, but you always start with a blank canvas. Want to just add an extra dungeon onto a preexisting RPG, with all the pre-established mechanics in place? Sorry, no can do. Better start learning code. And math.

The only appropriate reaction to realizing you’ll have to use math

One of the goals of The Endless Mission is to break down these barriers and have every level of UGC complexity available in one game. You can start out loading up prebuilt games and making minor changes - adjusting some variables here, placing an extra power-up there, and so forth. Or maybe you start by doing a simple find-and-replace mod where you take out all of Enemy A and replace them with Enemy B. One you’ve mastered that, you can move onto crafting entire levels from scratch. All the behind-the-scenes code necessary for the game to behave the way it should is already there without you having to write it up, but everything about the level itself, from geometry to enemies to mechanics used, is up to you. The ultimate goal, of course, is to not have to rely on any prebuilt code at all. If you want to build a game entirely from the ground up, writing your own code and using your own assets, The Endless Mission will let you do that.

This sense of progression -- this pipeline from minor edits to crafting entirely original games -- is the crux of The Endless Mission. Our hope is that someone with absolutely zero experience in coding or game editing can pick up The Endless Mission and, after spending enough time with the game, can create something that is completely, uniquely theirs. The Endless Mission will turn players into creators in ways that no other game has done before.

Today, you’re putting a fully-controllable race car in an otherwise-standard RTS just for a laugh. Tomorrow, you’ll be making a car-based RTS from scratch because that joke ended up being actually fun. That’s the power of The Endless Mission (and cars).

An Endless Unity of Games and Engines

… Yeah, we might’ve forced that title a bit, sorry.

One of the biggest roadblocks with games that have UGC features has always been the fact that not all the skills one learns while using those features are transferable to other platforms. Sure, conceptual lessons like “treat the player fairly”, “playtest and iterate”, and “please stop using the editor to make naughty images” can and should apply across multiple games (especially that last one), but knowledge regarding specific toolsets and their strengths and weaknesses do not. It doesn’t matter how much you know about using Dreams or the insanely awesome content you’re able to craft in it (and you can indeed craft some insanely awesome things) - the moment you move onto another game, you’re back to square one. Not even game making tools are immune to this - move from Adventure Game Studio over to M.U.G.E.N, and you have to learn an entirely new interface and non-standard coding language just to get up to speed.

The pineapple symbolizes a new UGC Tool. Captain Blackclaw symbolizes the huge leap that’s required whenever you want to learn a new tool. Our High School Lit teachers would be proud.

Again, making the skills you learn be transferable to other applications was a major goal for us when creating The Endless Mission. We wanted it to be so that anyone who mastered The Endless Mission’s full editor (after working their way up to it - see the previous section) would be able to move onto other, professional game-making tools without missing a beat. How do we plan to accomplish this? Well, The Endless Mission is created in Unity, one of the biggest and most-used game engines in the world. Why not simply base our in-game editor on what we used to create it?

If The Endless Mission’s editor looks familiar to you, congratulations! That was totally the point.

When creating the editor for The Endless Mission, we based many of its features on what Unity already uses. Concepts such as dividing the game up into scenes, having a game-wide hierarchy, tools like the library or inspector, and even the decision to use C# as the editor’s default programming language are all based on what Unity uses. In short, The Endless Mission’s editor is essentially a “shell” around Unity - a Unity editor inside a Unity game.

The end result of all this? We believe The Endless Mission is the perfect on-ramp to learning Unity, as well as other similar professional game engines. Everything in our editor has a direct counterpart in Unity, simply streamlined to function within our game. Whatever lessons and concepts you learn while using our tools will be directly applicable should you choose to move onto Unity. This is called having a transferable skill set, and it’s what sets The Endless Mission apart from the UGC-focused games that came before it: If you can master The Endless Mission at its most complex, you will already have everything you need to master Unity, and the learning skill to pick up other engines.

In Conclusion…

User Generated Content has come a long, long way since the days of Pinball Construction Set, Lode Runner, and Castle Smurfenstein. What once was just unofficial mods and basic level editors has paved the way to creating full games and other experiences, and it is our hope that The Endless Mission will continue this proud tradition. For us, it’s not just about giving players the power to create whatever they want, but the resources to learn content creation at their own pace and the ability to use that knowledge, both conceptual and technical, outside of the game. We want The Endless Mission to not just be the next generation of UGC-focused games, but the first one to provide a means - not just the desire - for players to turn their creativity into a career, with a community that will help and support them every step of the way.

What will you make in our game? The possibilities are simply... endless (... yes, we’ve been sitting on that pun until just the right moment)

Thank you for joining us on this journey through the history of UGC. We will be starting a closed beta very soon for those of you who signed up for it, and we will officially launch into Early Access not long after. Here’s to the future of User Generated Content, and we hope to see you all soon in The Endless Mission!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/827880/The_Endless_Mission/

Original post

02 Jul 2019Developer post

The Endless Mission and the History of UGC, Part 6

Hey there, folks! We’re in the home stretch now! Yes, sadly it’s true: While we’ve all been having fun these past few weeks getting our learn on, next week’s article will be the last in this series. We know, we’re inconsolable, too. We haven’t been this upset since paying full pr

Hey there, folks! We’re in the home stretch now! Yes, sadly it’s true: While we’ve all been having fun these past few weeks getting our learn on, next week’s article will be the last in this series. We know, we’re inconsolable, too.

We haven’t been this upset since paying full price for a game right before the Steam Summer Sale

We’ve covered a lot of ground these past weeks looking at the history of UGC. We’ve seen games about making games (and more!). Software that lets you make fully-featured games from the code on up. Fans taking matters into their own hands and modding games that otherwise had no UGC to speak of. What could possibly be left to go over in this penultimate article?

Literally Everything Else

… Oh. Uh… Yeah, there’s that.

To be a bit more specific about it: We’ve been spending most of our time discussing games and software where UGC - specifically, the kind of UGC that involves game making - is the “main” objective. However, there are many, many games out there that have other kinds of UGC as well. Character creators, level editors, simulation games with a “sandbox mode”... Any game with any sort of editor or creation system in place totally counts as UGC! This is especially true in the modern era, where platforms like Steam Workshop allow users to share their creations with players the world over.

Now, it probably goes without saying that we can’t cover every single game with UGC elements like this, and even trimming it down to a “Greatest Hits” selection would still be quite large. Thus, we’ll be going through examples much more quickly here than in previous articles, highlighting what high quality or unique UGC each game brought to the table before moving on. Now hold on tight - the UGC Train has no brakes!

Though maybe it should

Utopia (1982)

Simulation and construction games fill a weird niche in UGC-focused titles: sure, you have a lot of freedom to build stuff, but only if you have the resources to do so and follow the rules. Does this make them “real” UGC games, since you can’t just build whatever you want? If we assume they at least get an honorable mention, then the first game in this genre would be Utopia, released on the Intellivision back in 1982 (yes, even before the first “true” UGC title, Pinball Construction Set). This multiplayer game had two players build up cities on adjacent islands to see who can be more successful.

What do you do when you literally run out of room on the cartridge before implementing any sort of opponent AI? Just claim the game is multiplayer-only! Yes, really.

Lode Runner (1983)

Released the same year as Pinball Construction Set (and Castle Smurfenstein), this puzzle-platformer game contained 150 levels in addition to a full-blown level editor. While not devoted solely to creation like PCS was, this marked one of the first times a game contained a separate level editor mode.

Excitebike (1984)

In this NES classic, players could design their own tracks to race on, making this not only one of the first Nintendo games with UGC (a tradition they’d proudly continue, as we have already seen in previous articles and will continue to see in this one), but also one of the first editors available on a console platform, proving that UGC would not only be a “PC thing.”

Wrecking Crew (1985)

Another Nintendo classic, this puzzle game starring Mario also contained a level editor, beating out Super Mario Maker by a whopping 30 years.

Plumber, Doctor, Demolitionist… That deadbeat Mario can’t hold down a job for more than five minutes, can he?

SimCity (1989)

If Utopia was the first construction/simulation game, SimCity is the game that made the genre popular, spawning a metric ton of spin-offs. Like Utopia, there was no “sandbox” mode where you could build whatever you want with no restrictions, but it was still fun seeing what you could create even while following the rules and restrictions the game had in place.

The Incredible Machine (1993)

This cult-classic puzzle game tasks you with fixing broken contraptions clearly inspired by the works of cartoonist Rube Goldburg. In addition to the puzzles, there was a “freeform” mode where players could build whatever you wanted, whether they were complete machines or even more puzzles for others to solve.

Lego Racers (1999)

Given that Lego is all about building things, it’s only natural that numerous Lego video games would have some level of UGC in them. The most famous of these would probably be Lego Racers - in this game, not only was your avatar fully customizable, but you could build your car brick by brick, with unique physics based on how many pieces you used and where they were placed. Just be prepared to have that menu music stuck in your head forever.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzwV5085Vvo
You’re welcome.

RollerCoaster Tycoon (1999)

Well, we couldn’t use that gif above and not tip our hat to the game that provided it, now can we? RollerCoaster Tycoon was all about making and managing your own amusement park, with emphasis on the fact that you could lay out the track for certain attractions (like roller coasters, naturally) however you wanted, rather than just plopping down a static building. And yes, this absolutely included just letting your coasters fly off the rails and slam into populated areas. You monster.

The Sims (2000)

Out of all the spin-offs SimCity created, The Sims was far-and-away the most successful. This game essentially “scaled down” the scope of SimCity by having you manage a household of people (called Sims) rather than an entire city. You had lots of control over your Sims’ appearances and how they developed, but if you ever got tired of ~~having them pass out in their own filth~~ taking care of them, you could simply load up an empty lot and build your dream home with unlimited funds instead. You could also take pictures and save them in a family scrapbook, which many players used to tell epic stories ~~about them passing out in their own filth~~.

Animal Crossing (2001)

Not entirely unlike The Sims mentioned above, this charming little life simulator is all about living in a small town and making friends with all your animal neighbors. The ability to customize both your avatar and your home have existed since the original game, but due to the massive popularity of these elements, they’ve been expanded on in every entry. It’s gotten to the point they’ve even made a spin-off title, Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer, that’s all about making your own homes!

We were going to write a hilarious, in-character rant for Mr. Resetti that would be longer than the rest of this article, but then we remembered we aren’t paid by the word for this

Ultimate Ride (2001)

Loved building roller coasters in RollerCoaster Tycoon, but hated all that pesky management stuff? Ultimate Ride is the game for you! This Disney(!) game let you build and ride any coaster that you wanted in full 3D (hey, this was impressive back in 2001), with no monetary restrictions. There was a mission mode, but rather than managing funds or keeping parkgoers happy, you were tasked with making coasters that not only met certain requirements, but also remained safe enough that people could actually ride them, using the game’s surprisingly detailed physics simulation system to track G-Forces and the like. This game was a great example of UGC being used for educational purposes - in this case, physics and structural engineering.

City of Heroes (2004)

Character customization has been a thing in Massively Multiplayer Online games since the very beginning - after all, how else are you going to make your avatar unique compared to everyone else’s? City of Heroes, however, decided to take it one step further and introduced the Mission Architect. This feature allowed you to create custom quests in the game that other players could then play through and even earn EXP and items from. It was pretty ambitious for an MMO… and hey, it beats doing the same “kill 20 sewer rats” mission over and over to level grind.

Miis (2006)

Here’s a weird, not-quite-a-game-exactly entry for ya: when the Nintendo Wii launched, it came with the ability to create system-wide avatars called Miis. What made Miis unique compared to other avatar features in the past is how they interacted with games - many multiplayer games gave you the option to play as your Mii in addition to the usual cast of characters, giving your Mii a lot more prominence and importance than usual for this kind of avatar. Even if playing as your Mii wasn’t an option, there was a good chance that any and all Miis you created on the system would pop up in cameo roles in any given game (usually in crowd shots). This clever integration of UGC into all sorts of games is still used by Nintendo today, and there are even a few games (Tomodachi Life, Miitopia, etc.) that are based entirely on these little guys.

Halo 3 (2007)

The third entry of this gobsmackingly successful franchise introduced The Forge, a game mode where players could edit multiplayer maps and create custom games. While this mode would be included in many future Halo games as well, this technically isn’t the first time the franchise dipped its toe in the UGC pool - users were already using previous games in the franchise to create machinima, such as the ever-popular Red vs. Blue series that started in 2003 using the original Halo: Combat Evolved.

The office is still taking bets on which will end first: the Halo franchise or Red vs. Blue

Spore (2008)

Also jokingly referred to as “SimEverything”, Spore was a simulation game about tending to the evolutionary rise of lifeforms on a planet, from primordial ooze to space-traveling races. In addition to having your species evolve naturally through gameplay choices, you could also use the Spore Creature Creator to just jump right in and handcraft the perfect specimen. Additionally, the creatures you created didn’t just change your game - as you traveled to other planets, the creatures you encountered there were ones that other players had brought up, meaning every player’s creation had an impact on the game as a whole.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl (2008)

In addition to finally making the dream fight of Mario vs. Sonic a reality (look, this was a big deal for 90s kids, okay?), Super Smash Bros. Brawl brought a Stage Builder mode to the franchise. The one in Brawl was very basic, but subsequent games would improve on it more and more. Also, those Miis we talked about earlier? Starting in the next game, they’d become playable fighters, too, and both them and stages could be shared with others online. Time to go make a Mii of and beat the stuffing out of them!

Overwatch (2016)

Most games that have a built-in editor will let you do things like build levels or customize characters. When Overwatch debuted its Workshop mode, however, it went the extra mile, letting players straight-up write scripts and edit the code directly to create drastically new and different game modes. It can be pretty surreal booting up a team-based FPS and then playing a 2.5D beat-em-up instead, but you do you.

And then someone found a way to recreate Portal in it, because of course they did

Planet Coaster (2016)

Okay, one more roller coaster game for the road: Planet Coaster brings all the best aspects of previous theme park simulators together, having both a robust career mode where you have to manage funds and research as well as a sandbox mode where you can go nuts. It also features full freeform building for all structures, allowing players to create some truly unique designs and setpieces. You can even import your own 3D models into the game if the items that are already there aren’t enough!

In Conclusion…

Phew! That was a lot of games. They may not have fully embraced UGC as their “main” component (or had it thrust upon them by modders) like some of the games we discussed in previous weeks did, but their impact and influence should not be denied. Any one of these games could be the first step on someone’s journey from player to designer, and indeed, more often than not, it is. After all, someone enjoying a game and then deciding to check out its side-mode devoted to UGC is far more likely than them, say, downloading Garry’s Mod out of the blue and building a new game from scratch.

Be sure to check back next week for the epic series finale of The Endless Mission and the History of UGC! Don’t worry, there won’t be any arbitrary, character-wrecking plot twists that exist solely to “subvert expectations” - instead, we’ll be looking at where we go from here, and what the future of UGC will contain (spoiler alert: the answer may involve The Endless Mission). See you then!

CONTINUE TO PART SEVEN

https://store.steampowered.com/app/827880/The_Endless_Mission/

Image Sources: videoblocks.com, imgur.com, Mattel, Wikipedia, Nintendo, Redbull.com, youtube.com/norlag,

Original post

26 Jun 2019Developer post

Join Our Closed Beta!

Hi! We're back at it again and this time...it's for real. We're happy to announce The Endless Mission will soon be entering into a closed beta and we'd like you to be a part of it. SIGN UP HERE We want to connect with you and begin testing the various features, tools, stories, an

20 Jun 2019Developer post

The Endless Mission and the History of UGC, Part 5

Hey there, creators! Who’s hungry for some Mods? Our investors didn’t appreciate it when we told them our plan to “get more dough” was to start a pizza business Wait… That’s not the kind of Mod we’re talking about today? Uh… hold on a sec… Mod Pizza MOD Pizza is a fast casual piz

Hey there, creators! Who’s hungry for some Mods?

Our investors didn’t appreciate it when we told them our plan to “get more dough” was to start a pizza business

Wait… That’s not the kind of Mod we’re talking about today? Uh… hold on a sec…

Mod Pizza

MOD Pizza is a fast casual pizza restaurant chain based in the United States. Founded in Seattle, Washington, in 2008, MOD has more than 400 locations in the United States and United Kingdom. MOD is a company that is claimed by its owners to be "more about the people than the pizza" and to focus on paying living wages and providing employees with opportunities to give back to the community.

Game Mods

We’ve been looking at a lot of games (and software) that are entirely focused on letting users create new content, but not every game is like that, of course. Many games are all about playing through a perfectly crafted experience, and thus don’t have room to allow users to create whatever absurd things they can think of. There’s nothing wrong with this approach, but it can lead to players wanting… more.

And thus mods are born.

As the old saying goes: Lack of Thomas the Tank Engine in Skyrim is the Mother of Invention

Game mods are any sort of alteration created by users that change how a game plays. As such, game mods can easily be seen as a variation on the more traditional styles of UGC we’ve been discussing in previous weeks. There are many, many different kinds of mods out there, and to try and cover them all would be an exercise in futility. Some merely exist to patch bugs or make gameplay fixes that the original developers did not do. Others add new content to preexisting games, from new weapons and items to entire campaigns. Others still simply replace assets in the game with different ones, either to upgrade the graphics of the game piece by piece or to allow for completely absurd scenarios, like the infamous “Really Useful Dragons” mod pictured above. There are even mods that dig into the game’s code to find and restore content that was removed by the original developers… sometimes for good reason.

Pic Unrelated

Some companies don’t like it when users mod their games - adding a new overpowered weapon that only you have to an online multiplayer game, for instance, is generally frowned upon - but many others, such as Valve and Bethesda, embrace the modding community with open arms. Needless to say, this has resulted in mods becoming an indisputable and massively influential part of the gaming community.

For the purposes of this article, we are only going to look at a handful of examples. There is a large number of massively popular games with equally large modding communities - Grand Theft Auto, The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, etc. - and we simply cannot cover them all. Instead, we’ll be focusing most of our energy on games that had mods that themselves have made a large impact on the industry. But enough talk, let’s get to it!

Castle Wolfenstein (1981)

“This is how a normal person walks, right?” - Castle Wolfenstein’s Cover Artist, presumably

Trivia Time: What is generally accepted as the first video game mod ever created? The original game (as you might have guessed given… ya know… the title of this section) was Castle Wolfenstein, released in 1981, but the first mod created for it wouldn’t come out until two years later in 1983. That’s right, the same year as Pinball Construction Set! Man, 1983 was a big year for UGC of all stripes, wasn’t it?

In any case, back in the early 80s, teenagers Andrew Johnson and Preston Nevins were huge fans of the original Castle Wolfenstein. However, they felt as though the Nazi antagonists weren’t particularly threatening (again: it was the 80s), so they decided to go into the game and replace them with something much more threatening.

Naturally, they choose Smurfs.

Rumors that Gargamel was their third programming buddy are unconfirmed

Using only a paint program, sector editor, and Muse Software’s “Voice”, Andrew and Preston created Castle Smurfenstein, a full-game conversion of Castle Wolfenstein. All the Nazi guards were replaced with Smurfs, complete with new Smurf audio in place of German. They also created new title and closing screens, and even composed a new opening theme. In doing so, they created what is considered the first game mod, opening the door for all others.

The duo would go on to create another mod in the form of Dino Smurf, a parody of the game Dino Eggs, before college would put an end to their anti-Smurf propaganda days. However, their impact on gaming cannot be overstated, as it is because of them that mods thrive to this very day.

And so do Smurfs. Unfortunately.

Doom (1993)

It’s been 26 years, and they still haven’t explained what’s up with that second Space Marine in the background

Doom is a game that needs no introduction - it’s theclassic first-person shooter that put the genre on the map. It proved the effectiveness of shareware as a marketing tactic. It crashed university servers across the country due to so many college kids wanting to do multiplayer deathmatches. It generated a firestorm of controversy over its violence and satanic imagery (despite the fact that said violence was directed at said satanic imagery… go figure). But we’re not here to talk about all that; we’re here to talk about the mods.

Doom was created by id Software, and its founders, Tom Hall and John Carmack, recalled how their previous title, Wolfenstein 3D, received a good number of mods from fans (no word on how much Smurf killing was involved this time). Thus, they decided to go out of their way and make sure that Doom would be simple for anyone to go in and mod. All of Doom’s assets, such as maps, sprites, textures, and so forth, were stored in a file completely separate from the game’s engine. This made it a simple affair for novice coders to go in and create their own levels without having to mess with the game’s code directly. By 1994, they would release more user-friendly tools to make modding their game even easier.

Besides custom levels, swapping out art assets was another popular mod choice, facilitating some… pretty surreal crossovers

Doom would mark the first time that the developer of a game would offer so much support for its own modding community, rather than simply leaving them to their own devices. This resulted in the game reaching even further heights in popularity, and the concept of game mods breaking fully into the public conscious of the gaming community. Many a game developer’s career would begin by making Doom mods, including id Software’s very own Tim Willits. If Castle Wolfenstein was the first game to feature mods, Doom was the game that made sure they were here to stay.

The Doom modding community is still alive and well, by the way - not just for later games in the franchise, but for the 1993 classic as well. As recently as last year, one of the original designers on the game, John Romero, released a large level pack for the original game in celebration of its 25th anniversary. This game, it seems, is as unstoppable as Doomguy himself.

Half-Life (1998)

We won’t make the easy joke here because 1) It’s not funny, 2) It’s not original, and 3) …

It may have been id Software that was the first to establish a relationship between a developer and the fans who mod their games, but Valve was the one who proved just how successful such a relationship could be. When Half-Life came out in 1998, Valve made the software development kit for the game’s engine, GoldSrc, available for users to mess around in. A year later in 1999, college student Minh Le, with help from his friend Jess Cliffe, released a mod for the game called Counter-Strike. While Half-Life was a single-player experience, Counter-Strike was a team-based multiplayer game where you played as either a terrorist or counter-terrorist while trying to complete various objectives.

Ah, 1999... The Glory Days of the “Real is Brown” mentality in video game graphics

By 2000, the mod had gotten so popular that Valve came to Minh and Jess with an offer - they wanted to not only buy the rights to Counter-Strike, but hire the duo to continue working on updates for the game. They agreed, and Counter-Strike went from fan mod to commercial release to, eventually, a multi-million dollar franchise that has hundreds of thousands of players to this very day.

Counter-Strike was one of the first games to bridge the fan mod to official release gap, and in doing so proved once and for all that mods weren’t just a hobby or even a “stepping stone” to bigger things, but a genuine means of entering the game industry proper. Valve, for their part, would continue this practice of scouting out modders to hire to turn their creations into commercial products, as we will see in the very next entry…

Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos (2002)

Wanna make a gamer feel old? Act like you’re surprised that Warcraft was anything other than an MMO.

Now, wait a second here: How is Valve associated with Warcraft? That’s a Blizzard game! It says so right there on the box! Well, hunker down, ‘cuz it’s gonna get a little crazy.

Back when Blizzard Entertainment released Warcraft II, they included a free “world editor” in the game that let players create custom scenarios and maps for the game, which could then be shared online (or, if it was a multiplayer set-up, play it with others) via their Battle.net service. Once Warcraft III came out in 2002, it was only natural that they’d bring this feature back and expand on it. Within the year, a guy by the name of Eul (real name: Kyle Sommer), inspired by the custom StarCraft map known as “Aeon of Strife”, would release a brand new scenario called Defense of the Ancients, or DotA.

Yup, that’s right: the entire Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) genre started as a game mod.

MOBAs: Putting a new twist on the phrase “Stay in your Lane”

While Eul wouldn’t continue to update DotA after the original release, several other modders would take over, including Steve “Guinsoo” Feak and IceFrog (real name unknown… yes, really). Now, this is when things start getting wild, so try to keep up: Guinsoo would eventually stop working on DotA and join Riot Games, using his knowledge from working on DotA to help create the MOBA mega-hit, League of Legends. Valve, meanwhile, knowing a good idea when they saw one, swooped in and hired IceFrog to make DotA 2 from the ground up for them as, despite originally being a mod for a Blizzard game, Blizzard did not ever try to claim a copyright on the name or concept. Not to be outdone, Blizzard would respond to this by creating their own MOBA in the form of Heroes of the Storm. So in summary - The original DotA was a mod of a Blizzard game, one dev on that team would go on to help make LoL with Riot Games, Valve would get the rights to make DotA 2 with the help of another dev from the same team, and Blizzard would make HotS all on their own. Got all that?

We’ll take your stunned silence as a “Yes”

DotA perhaps represents the peak of what game mods can do. It was a fan-made mod, made possible by the support of devs for their modding communities, that not only went on to become a commercial success, but in the process create an entire new game genre that would sky-rocket in popularity soon after. If there was ever a question as to whether or not UGC could make a wide-scale impact on the gaming industry, DotA is proof that it absolutely can.

… And if you’re ever getting ticked off over that little brat Teemo ganking you yet again, at least now you know exactly who to blame.

The face of pure, unadulterated evil

Minecraft (2009)

Look who’s back, back again…

… Hey, we told you we’d come back around to Minecraft eventually, didn’t we? Just took us like two whole articles to get there.

As we mentioned at the beginning of this article, mods are a very popular feature for many modern games, bolstered no doubt by success stories like those in the previous entries in this article. There’s no way we could possibly cover all of them here, so we figured that singling out one to highlight would suffice. Thus, it’s time to bring back Minecraft!

Modding in Minecraft is almost as old as Minecraft itself, and is indeed one of the major factors in the game’s astronomical success. Mods took off so fast because the original version of Minecraft was programmed using Java, a coding language that’s very easy to pick apart and edit. In fact, even though a new version of Minecraft that is coded in C++ rather than Java was later released by Mojang, they are still keeping the Java version up-to-date alongside the C++ version, specifically because they didn’t want to abandon all the modders who had done their projects in Java. And yes, there have been a number of Minecraft modders who have since been hired by Mojang to work on the game proper as well. Talk about a strong relationship between the developers and the modders, huh?

Bibliocraft is just one of the many, many mods that adds new items for you to build… And is also one of the many, many mods whose name is just [Something]craft. Hey, no one said modders had to be good with titles.

Of course, it’s easy to see why Mojang would want to keep the modders happy, as some of the things they’ve created are insanely impressive. Many mods have added features that would go on to be included in official updates due to their popularity - the Mo’ Creatures mod, for instance, had horses long before they were put in the game proper. Others focus on optimization, UI improvements, or plain making the game prettier. Additionally, since you can host servers in Minecraft that others can join, you and your online buddies can even experience the changes these mods offer together! It was this kind of multiplayer-focused modding that lead to the creation of MinecraftEdu, which some of us here at E-Line had a hand in developing with Mojang’s full support.

A Creeper blew up my--- Wait, we used that joke last time, never mind

However, as much as we’d like to toot our own horn when it comes to multiplayer Minecraft mods, our work isn’t the biggest success story in that regard. That honor would have to go to the Survival Games mod first released in 2012, just three years after Minecraft’s initial release. Inspired by the Hunger Games novels and film adaptations, this mod turns a Minecraft server into a brutal free-for-all where dozens of players must search for resources and battle each other to be the last blocky person standing. The map starts out huge but, as time goes on, it gets smaller and smaller to force confrontations between players. Sound familiar?

… Well, okay, yes, but if you’re citing THIS, you’re an even bigger nerd than we thought

Yup. Much like DotA before it, the Survival Games mod in Minecraft would go on to inspire an entire game genre, in this case Battle Royale. Before Fortnite, before PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, there was this humble Minecraft mod.

Minecraft is perhaps the ultimate summation of all mod-heavy games that came before it. It is a game that thrived as much as it did because of its mod support. The company behind it recognized this, and fostered a healthy relationship with their modding community. And ultimately, the work of these modders would wind up making a huge impact on the gaming industry as a whole. All of this, and even at ten years old, there are no signs of Minecraft slowing down. Who knows what these modders will do next? Guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

Until then, there’s always the pig poop mod

In Conclusion…

Mods may not be a fully-intended feature of all games, but they nonetheless provide an opportunity for some truly unique cases of UGC. They have opened the door for people looking to get into the game industry in a multitude of ways, and in the greatest cases have made an impact on the industry itself. Those of us working on The Endless Mission are well aware of just how powerful and transformative mods can be, and you can rest assured that the game will cater to that in many, many ways. As for next week, we’ll be going through “the rest of the best” when it comes to games with UGC - games that provided plenty of opportunities for users to create even when it wasn’t the focus. See you then!

CONTINUE TO PART SIX

https://store.steampowered.com/app/827880/The_Endless_Mission/

Image Sources:
Mod Pizza, Eurogamer, bhatpsych.com, wikipedia.org, uic.edu, hollywoodreporter.com, id software, polygon.com, techspot.com, youtube.com/ggwp, spauldinggrp.com, mobafire.com, microsoft.com, bibliocraftmod.com, jasonwilmot.com, pcgamesn.com

Original post

Updates & announcements

Make or Break Time

Made to Ruin

Humble Beginnings

Laying the Groundwork

Swap and Go

Tracking Progress

NEW!

IMPROVED!

FIXED!

THE RULES ARE SIMPLE:

TO ENTER:

EXTRA SPECIAL BONUS:

Excitebike (1984)

Stunts/4D Sports Driving (1990)

Lego Racers (1999)

TrackMania (2003)

Trials HD (2009)

ModNation Racers (2010)

Conclusion

Patch Notes

Global

Editor

Racing Simulators: Everything Except the Traffic Jams and Gas Prices

Kart Racing: Where Road Rage is Encouraged

Arcade Racing: Don’t Call it a Comeback, We’ve Been Here the Whole Time

Conclusion

Space Race: The First Racing Game

A Marathon of Firsts

And Now, For The Most Obvious Entry In This Article

Conclusion

You Gotta Walk Before You Can Run (And The Endless Mission Lets You Do Both)

An Endless Unity of Games and Engines

In Conclusion…

Literally Everything Else

Utopia (1982)

Lode Runner (1983)

Excitebike (1984)

Wrecking Crew (1985)

SimCity (1989)

The Incredible Machine (1993)

Lego Racers (1999)

RollerCoaster Tycoon (1999)

The Sims (2000)

Animal Crossing (2001)

Ultimate Ride (2001)

City of Heroes (2004)

Miis (2006)

Halo 3 (2007)

Spore (2008)

Super Smash Bros. Brawl (2008)

Overwatch (2016)

Planet Coaster (2016)

In Conclusion…

To request a spot in the Closed Beta, please complete the following steps:

Mod Pizza

Game Mods

Castle Wolfenstein (1981)

Doom (1993)

Half-Life (1998)

Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos (2002)

Minecraft (2009)

In Conclusion…