Question Vehicle changer power-up

Hey all,

One idea that has floated around is a power-up that when hit changes your vehicle.

We have only spent like 10-minutes or so discussing how it would work but wanted to float it by people here to get feedback.

Power Up Description:
- when hit will bring back new iterations on old vehicles from Free Rider
- the power up will have 5 different options (Helicopter, Hot Air Balloon, Unicycle, Monster Truck, Blob)
- when a power-up is hit, you will stay as that vehicle for x seconds, right now we are thinking 10 seconds
- power-ups can stack, so if you hit a helicopter, you will be one for 10 seconds, when you hit another you will get +10 seconds but if you hit a new type of vehicle power up you will switch and time will be set to 10 seconds
- we may place restrictions around placement of powerups so that you cannot stack them on top of each other etc
- countdown would show up in screen x seconds remaining until you return to original bike, vehicle will also likely begin to pulsate to highlight that it will be changing back to a bike soon
- if you hit a vehicle changer power up, it will be deactivated so that you can't hit it again

Why this power up? Well, we constantly get asked to bring back old vehicles, this in a way achieves that but doesn't bring in a ton of complication like sorting tracks by vehicle type etc and stays true to the bike game that free rider has always been but adds in a new game element that track authors can use.

If you have feedback, or suggestions on how the feature should behave please let us know here.

 

When we first considered the feature, the suggestion was to add a on / off power up which we felt would increase the complexity of the power up placement. A countdown of x seconds seemed like it could be a good choice as if authors wanted players to hold vehicles longer they could place them on the track and would align with a popular game mechanic used in other games where players goal is to get "more gas" to prolong flight or driving, would be the same idea where you get the monster truck you would want to burn through to try to get another powerup if it exists before you switch back to a bike.

We could make it permanent with no on/off but then players would just create a track with a truck power up right at the start, which would essentially turn it into a truck track which we were looking to avoid.

 

I love the idea, would give me a ton of new creative track ideas. I'm not sure about the timer though, I'd rather have it on/off

 

Originally I did too until I started to think through implementation. Adding an on/off seems like it will complicate the UI needed to place the power-up (is different than all the one mode power ups we currently have), players could basically drop a power up right at the front and have the whole track be a truck which at that point we might as well add vehicles as starting vehicles and seems like it may complicate the development of tracks to get players to hit the off.

Having a timed power-up is something common in other games and may open us up to modes such as "invincibility" where the mode would be timed for 5 seconds.

 

It just seems weird to me when creating a track. Say you want the track to have a truck section, or to have a 'helicopter escape' section or something, you'd want the player to be that vehicle untill the end of that section and not untill 10 sec are over. Having to place a bunch of power-ups to renew your 'truck energy' would be awkward and would look bad. I can't really think of an instance where having it on a timer would be useful, unless you'd make a helicopter track where you would crash if you ran out of fuel.