Space-Truckers: The Video Game Design
The basic idea behind Space-Truckers is simple: get stuff from Point A to Point B, in spaaace! (It’s not required to draw out that last word, but it helps set the mood.) As a game, it is separated into several distinct phases or states:
- Landing (Home) Screen
- Splash Screen
- Menus (inc. High Scores)
- Route Planning
- Driving + Scoring
Each of these screens (used as a synonym for “state” here) will be established, then later enhanced over the course of this book along with an underlying application to support and coordinate between them.
Landing
This is the first thing that a player sees when they navigate to space-truckers.com (or the beta testing site, dev.space-truckers.com). It’s an HTML page with a simple Call to Action: “Launch.” Under the hood, however, the HTML page is the host for the main application canvas – the WebGL context onto which all the rendered outputs are painted. It is responsible for loading the packaged web application as well as registration of a Service Worker (see Chapter 13, Converting the Application to a PWA) to manage and pre-fetch assets. As the DOM host, it provides access to the web browser and through it the host machine’s resources, such as the ability to play sound or read input from gamepads or VR hardware. Learn more about this in Chapter 3, Establishing the Development Workflow.
Splash Screen
In music and comedy, a warm-up act precedes the main headline performance as a way to put audiences into a particular frame of mind or mood. After all, it’s much easier to crank things up past 10 on the volume dial when you’re already at 7! The Space-Truckers Splash Screen serves that purpose, as well as giving us an opportunity to showcase the underlying framework and proclaim that this game is Powered by Babylon.js. Once the short, animated content completes, the application enters “attract mode” to entice players to continue.
Menus
The transportation hub of the game, the Main Menu, is where players will start a new game, view high scores, exit back to the landing page, and potentially do more. Sound effects and an animated selection icon bring a bit of motion to a twinkling background. The menu system is initially covered in Space-Truckers: The Main Menu section of Chapter 4, Creating the Application.
Route Planning
One of the two main game phases, the Route Planning Simulation, is where players become content creators. Using a top-down map view, drivers plan their route before embarking on their journey. From an initial starting orbit close to the inner-most planet, players must balance how much launch force is used with aiming and timing to put the simulated cargo on a path to the destination planet. Once launched, the cargo is entirely at the mercy of gravity and Sir Isaac Newton. Pro tip: aim ahead of where you want to end up but be sure to account for the pull of the sun. Because it is a simulation of a route, there are no consequences for failure – the player is free to try as many times as they want to find the perfect route to drive in the next phase.
Driving and Scoring
After planning out the desired route, it’s time for players to then take the wheel and guide their Space-Truck through the transit corridor while avoiding collision with the random events that have been recorded during the route planning phase. The player’s unit drifts in free-fall, so velocity accrued in any given direction will remain unless later canceled out by opposing acceleration. Collision results in damage, and with enough damage, the truck and its cargo are destroyed.
Figure 1.7 – Collisions during the driving phase have consequences
On a brighter note, completing the course results in the player’s score being calculated. Several different factors contribute to the overall total final score. The length of the route, the time it took the simulation to complete the route versus the time the player took, and the initial launch velocity in route planning are all some of the factors involved in scoring. If a player’s score is high enough, then it will displace one of the previous high score holders to place the player’s selected initials into the hall of legends.
This is the game in a nutshell. As with any such high-level overview, it is necessarily lacking in some detail, but it provides a holistic picture of what we’re going to be developing over the course of this book. To get into more detail, we’re going to need to first get an understanding of where we can find those details as well as where and how to pick up supporting context in the GitHub repository for Space-Truckers.