Developing Ideas 02

After researching into racing games available on portable Apple products I have gather a lot of ideas that I wish to incorporate in my game idea.

As I explained in my previous entries, I want to design a children's racing game for the ipad. I chose to make it available only on ipad because the amount of features required on the game will use a lot of screen space, and i want the player to get the best gaming experience possible. I thought, hmmm targeting children is an interesting audience to go for but by themselves they wouldn't be able to afford an ipad. I then decided to target it at families as a whole. That way at least one member of the family would have an ipad that a child would be allowed to access.

I have drawn up a basic in game overview of how I want everything to look.

Top Left: Character, and the cars damage meter.

Middle Left: Track map. Shows all the other racers positions, and your car's position is highlighted in red.

Top Right: Racers position out of 8 players on the track

Middle Right: Lap number

Bottom Right: Car's speedometer and boost bar

Bottom Middle: Two directional arrows are the steering controls. Press either button to go left or right.
Also in the middle you can see the car that you are driving.

Off the race track I'm thinking of adding an educational aspect to it, so when children are playing they learn something. I don't want to make it too riddled with facts that a child would just put the game on and move onto something else. I was thinking along the lines of being able to use materials from different time periods to use in the construction of your car. For example, during the English industrial revolution, there was a lot of iron and steam powered technology. Using steam power in your car and making it out of metals would make it faster and more durable. Another  example would be making a car from prehistoric materials such as wood and dinosaur bones. It would make your car faster, but venerable to heavy damage.

In the car construction menu, when you scroll over selected items from different time periods a little bit of text will appear describing the item, when it was made and what its function is. It will also display a rating or recommendation to what race style the item is suited for like drag racing, circuits, sprints, battles etc...

For a quick game, players can select preset cars, that are automatically tuned for different racing scenarios.