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“StrongCar Racing” is a time-trial racing game for the GP2X handheld console, created for the “Advanced Games Software Development” module at the University of Teesside. The brief was fairly open, stating only that the game must involve a “scrolling background”, i.e. that it must not all take place on a single screen.
This, along with my dissertation, was one of the most rewarding projects set during my University career. The basic concept, that of racing dodgy old Pandas and Micras, is one I’d toyed with for a long time, so I jumped on the opportunity to realise that vision. The choice of Mode 7 was a natural one for a racing game, as it has proved so popular on the SNES and Gameboy Advance. I found when coming to implement it, however, that the GP2X doesn’t support hardware rotation and scaling! This put the hardware at serious disadvantage against the two Nintendo consoles, as I had to emulate the Mode 7 effect in software. I’m quite pleased with the performance I achieved in the end.
As well as Mode 7, “StrongCar Racing” had a couple of other killer features. Firstly, track editing was simple, requiring just a couple of maps to be drawn in Photoshop. This meant that I could send an early release out to various friends who were more than happy to contribute racetracks, resulting in a rich variety of different courses. Secondly, I bore localisation in mind from the start. Localisation is often overlooked at early stages in games, especially in small-studio and student projects, so I thought it would be interesting to consider it. I found that it affected small decisions early in the project – decisions like maintaining a stringtable rather than manually writing out strings, using wide characters instead of ASCII, and so forth. Having written the software in this manner to begin with, when the time came to integrate translations they slotted straight in with no hassle. The version I handed in was translated into twelve languages, including Greek and Japanese.
The above “trailer” was created the day after handing the piece in – a wonderful way to relax after the hard work of crunch time!