Third Week of October

This week I had to consider that I actually planned to do, since making a game this advanced would be impossible for me to do alone in the time frame.

While making a game of this complexity to the standard it would require making it playable is outside of my ability given the time frame for the project. I intend to produce a simple flash top down racer bringing in some of the ideas and themes that would make this game unique.
The images and graphics used in this will not be an accurate representation of the graphics that should be expected from the actual game. They will be simplified and contain much less animation in the transformation sequences.
The purpose of the top down flash game is to give an appropriate visual representation of what the game would look like and how the altering terrain would affect the race and the requirements of the player.
While I considered trying to make a visual representation of the race itself using the unreal engine this was quickly dismissed due to the fact that it would take significantly more time to produce without the end result being any closer to my intended final product. Working with the unreal engine would require modelling the vehicles, and their transformations, in 3D and producing the race course in unreal also.
Creating the course in 3D wouldn’t be too difficult and producing a fly-thru matinee would be a good way to demonstrate the kind of environments I hope to include in the game. However, adding my created vehicles to the map and adding new script to trigger the transformations at the right time would not only be very time consuming, but wouldn’t demonstrate the design of the game in a more appropriate manner than flash would.
The flash demo will be top down and the racing will be controlled using W, A, S & D to accelerate, brake or reverse and to turn both left and right. The transformation will happen at predefined locations when the environment changes, however there will not be a cinematic transformation as this would be both difficult to animate and would be poorly represented in flash.
As mentioned previously, creating a course using the unreal engine would not be too difficult, so using UnrealEd 3 I will produce a basic course which will take into account the road terrain, a waterborne section, an airborne section and possibly either an off-road or mountainous section. While building this I hope to incorporate a number of static meshes and 3D models, created by myself for this project, to better demonstrate the design for the environments.
Creating a course which incorporates all of the terrain necessary for the race, but still looks natural and not manufactured may be quite difficult. I feel good use of the terrain tools in unreal as well as creative positioning of some natural static meshes, such as trees, grass and ferns; will help produce the desired effect.
In conjunction with this I plan to produce a series of 3D models using 3D Studio Max, this will for me be the hardest element of my intended content as I have the least experience with this software.
I plan to produce a 3D model of a starting car and an endgame car, as well as an airborne version and a waterborne version. These will serve to be the most accurate representation of the intended graphic quality of the vehicles in the game; they will be accompanied by a series of sketches and detailed drawings.