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As I mentioned in my first post, the idea for Motorsport came about in 2015. It’s been a long journey for me and the game, so I wanted to share some of the story behind development.
I always knew I wanted the game to be a deck builder. But that doesn’t mean I always knew exactly how I wanted it to work. There’s a lot of room to wiggle within the already established conventions of the genre, and that was before I even tried to begin innovating some mechanics. There are several early versions of the game that are markedly different from what Motorsport is today, and some of them, well, sucked.
To be fair, this was my first time developing a game completely from scratch. While I was very confident in my ability to get the math right, I initially way overestimated my capacity to properly judge what people would find fun. You mean you don’t want to spend 4+ hours meticulously building a car from scratch to meet relentlessly harsh specifications with zero room for error?!
That’s why we test! These early problems were made immediately obvious during the first playthroughs with testers. If you’ve ever wanted to get into game development, check your ego at the door. Testing can be brutal on your confidence. But if you can learn to take the feedback and merge it with your vision, you can come out the other side with something better than you could have imagined. Motorsport has been whittled into something lean, fast, and (most importantly) very fun!
The very earliest versions of Motorsport existed only in the digital realm, a mishmash of numbers and text strewn across a sea of Google Sheets tabs. I didn’t really know what I was doing at the time, but, though my methods evolved, I still use Sheets as my primary development tool to this day. It’s just so convenient to have the game in the cloud. I can pull it up and review or make changes anytime, anywhere, across a range of devices. I was (and still am) ignorant of what tools “real” developers use for game creation, but I can’t recommend Sheets or Excel enough. Games are just math, anyways.
As much as I rely on spreadsheets, sometimes you just need to put pencil to paper. I have a little composition notebook with all of the ideas and concepts that required a more organic touch than the keyboard and mouse could provide. I must warn, I am NOT an artist. But these little doodles were about just quickly capturing ideas. The book also contains pages of sloppily scribbled stream of conscience notes that I took while playing, which would later be distilled down into the core of the game. It’s interesting to go back and look at the early pages and see all of the ideas and mechanics that didn’t make it into the game, a lot of which I don’t even remember writing!
For the first physical iteration of the game I used good ol’ trusty notecards and markers. Simple but effective! By this time, the basics of the game were mostly in place. I didn’t realize it until I dug to find the pictures for this post, but the colors of these notecards ended up being the four Upgrade colors in the final version of Motorsport. It’s funny how random stuff like this finds its way into the game.
After the notecards came a barebones print and play version. This was a streamlined template I created that was linked to a spreadsheet. Any changes I made to the text or numbers in the spreadsheet would be automatically updated in the print and play layout, so I could quickly make changes and re-print the latest version.
At this point, the game mechanics were fleshed out enough that I could begin the artwork. This is where things start to get fun! Now it starts feeling like an actual game with a theme, rather than just a pile of stats and numbers. Fun fact: before the game was called Motorsport, it was called RACE. I ended up changing it because it was a little too cutesy, and it ignored the fact that not all of the Events are races.
Finally, after years of testing and development, I got the first prototype copy printed. I can’t tell you the joy I had when I opened the game for the first time. Even with the hundreds of hours of work and playtesting and design, the game still felt like this abstract thing. Until I put my hands on it for the first time. It was real.
And now, here we are. Just days away from the campaign. Simultaneously exciting and terrifying.
So why did it take five years to complete the game? Well, really, it didn’t. The game was created in short bursts of motivation and inspiration, intertwined with long periods of inactivity due to fear and imposter syndrome paralysis. There was also a two year gap in there where I didn’t work on the game at all, after losing most of my graphic assets due to a computer error. But about a year ago, I finally decided to get off my ass and finish the game. It deserved it. And now, I couldn’t be prouder of what I’ve created.
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