Update on Track Creator + Feedback on Campaigns, Achievements and more

Hey y'all, long time no talk! We have been super busy on the track creator (which is coming a long awesome by the way) and working on requirements for basically the "game" portion of Free Rider HD but wanted to give an update on both those things today.

Track Creator
It is our goal to get a extreme beta of the track creator on the site this week. By extreme beta we mean that it will be a chance for logged in players to play around with the tools and UI to give us early feedback. The version that we release will not support upload, export or publishing capabilities until we can get some more testing complete. The beta release will be targeted at desktop players as for tablet support we will have to change up a couple of things. From there we should be able to get a fully functional version up relatively quickly.

Additional game design possibilities up for discussion + thoughts (Campaigns, Achievements, Shop)
We have been busy brainstorming, listening to players and more brainstorming on how to add engaging game features to Free Rider HD to increase player engagement without "ruining" the open world aspect. Here is where our current brainstorming has taken us and looking for initial feedback from players here today.

Introduction of 2 new stats: pts and coins.

pts are essentially experience points that can be earned through completing campaign tracks, community tracks and achievements.
coins can be earned from completing campaign tracks with 3 stars (more on that) and achievements. Coins can be spent on non-performance enhancing updates to your character and vehicles that will show up in replays and races.

Campaigns
Campaigns will be a set of tracks selected by game design / developers that will hopefully give a new player a better initial experience and teach them how to play initially and get more difficult as they progress. Each campaign will consist of 10 tracks or so. Over time we would expect to hold "contests" for authors to submit their tracks for Campaign consideration, Campaigns in that respect could be considered the same as getting a track featured. Depending on best time to complete a track a player will be awarded 1-star, 2-stars or 3-stars where each one would award points and 3-star would award coins.

Achievements
Daily and total player achievements for completing campaigns with full stars, completing x number of community tracks. Author achievements for single and total track plays, votes, rating etc.

Shop
Trade in coins for bike color, tire color, spokes on bike, bike flags, player customization such as hats, helmets, shoes, etc. All purchasable items from the shop would not be performance enhancing.

Track Creator Unlocking
As some of you may be aware with FR3 we created a "Under Judgement" track listing for new tracks submitted, once tracks hit a certain rating threshold they were either accepted or rejected. Right now we are leaning towards just one track database but still have concerns over how we can reduce spammy type tracks from being submitted, it is an issue that we have seen across a lot of different sites where players can submit content and is something that we want to improve with FRHD.

For all the track authors out there would be interested to know how much do you use Free Rider to play tracks versus creating tracks? The reason why I am asking is instead of unlocking the ability to upload tracks immediately upon registration what are authors thoughts on gating that through completing x number of tracks etc in order to unlock that ability?

We plan to allow the ability to save / load works in progress immediately which will allow you to share your wip if you want with friends etc for feedback.


Anyways, this is really a rough initial thought but wanted to through it out there for comments, concerns and feedback.

 

Right now it is really a high level concept, but wanted to throw out how coins / points could be earned, pts are tied to progress in the game and coins are rewarded to spend on different features in the game.

I think we should be able to get campaigns and achievements together relatively quickly, we just need to get our head down on game design for those features and number crunching.

 

And maybe some "realtime" racing? We have a lot of ideas but quite a bit of work to get through first with track creator + achievements + campaigns + shop, extending a base set of achievements after release will be our plan.

 

http://community.freeriderhd.com/threads/track-creator-update.157/