Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Competition Modes
A few vehicle simulations aren't really games because they don't offer the player a
goal, apart from learning to control the vehicle. They don't have any rules other
than the laws of physics. Most vehicle simulations, however, offer driving or flying
within a competitive context, either a race or a battle of some kind.
The competition modes of military flight simulators resemble those of first-
person shooters: single-player modes against artificial opponents, multiplayer death
matches (every player for himself), and team-based play. Civilian flight simulators
usually offer only a single-player mode, although they sometimes also allow races
and follow-my-lead competitions. Driving simulators are generally single-player
games or multiplayer races and are seldom team-based.
Both military flight simulators and organized race-driving simulators often include
a career mode; in this mode the player creates a pilot or driver and follows his
career (trying not to get him killed, of course), racking up victories and collecting
performance statistics.
These games also include campaign modes. In a driving game's campaign mode,
the player, as a race driver, tries to win in a real racing circuit, collecting points
according to the official rules of the circuit.
In military flight simulators, the campaign mode can work in a variety of ways. In
one type of campaign mode, the game offers a series of missions, one at a time, in
which the player must achieve a specified victory condition before going on to the
next mission; completing all the missions constitutes winning the campaign. In
another type of campaign mode, the player can play all the missions in order,
whether she meets the mission objectives or not. However, if she plays through all
of them without achieving enough mission objectives, she loses the campaign. The
better she fights on any given occasion, the more chance she has of winning the
war in the long run, but she can still afford to lose the occasional battle. This more
closely approximates what happens in a real war, but as the designer, you must pro-
vide clear feedback to the player about how she's doing as she goes along.
Gameplay and Victory Conditions
The primary challenge in playing any vehicle simulator is in controlling the vehi-
cle: learning to speed it up, slow it down, and steer it without crashing it into
something. Without being able to feel the G-forces on his body, the player has to
depend on other cues to determine how fast he is going and how hard he is
braking.
In the case of flight simulators, you can make this challenge simple, requiring the
player to know almost nothing about aerodynamics, or extremely difficult, accu-
rately modeling the behavior of an airplane. Unlike a car, airplanes respond rather
slowly to their controls, often beginning to execute a maneuver a few seconds after
the player has first moved the yoke or joystick. Players used to driving a car will
