Hello everyone! I felt like posting something today that is partially non-challenge related.
So, i know that barely anyone knows about this but Ryan2007 and me hosted something called GridWalk. In short, it was something with lore, a story and “multiplayer”. We mixed the ideas of a challenge with a story and strategy. It was a while ago, but in short it was mostly a failure. It did show that the idea would work and it was a really good idea and it was extremely fun, but it was not very well planned and the “multiplayer” part needed some improvement.
We knew at the time that what we had come up with had a huge amount of potential, so i will try to explain it a bit better.
The main point which made it interesting was that we were using a story, random events and a news broadcast.
Those 3 things acted like kinda like challenge rules. The story showed what you had to beat and the state that the country was in, the random events put a twist on what you could do every once in a while and the news which announced when a new car came out, announced random events, announced things that were story related and put in occasional useless info and interviews.
Now, to more of the gameplay part. We used the campaign mode, but i think if we do this again its better if we just use sandbox mode, partially because campaign is not available in the alpha currently but mostly because campaign caused confusion.
We also had the idea of assembling teams of designers and advisers, but we never really got to that. I think we should do that if we do GridWalk again though.
We progressed time in a “multiplayer” type way by progressing time at the exact same time to the exact same year, which was a terrible idea.
There were much more details but if we do this again we need to heavily simplify what we came up with first. Solutions to problems mentioned before and more problems will be mentioned later in the post.
But before i get to something else, i do want to make an exception and solve one of the problems right now. Multiplayer.
You might have noticed me saying “multiplayer” and not multiplayer, and that was because GridWalk was basically just singleplayer with perceived competition.
If we do this again we need to change the way of how we did it before. I am not even going to explain how it worked before because it was way too complicated and just a bad solution that we didn’t think about.
My new idea is that we use more of a challenge format, with companies/people having 1 week to come up with one car or multiple cars within everything said in the story and hints given in the news of what people want. At the end of the week when every car has been entered, a jury and a reviewer will decide the score. The reviewer will drive the cars in beamng and will put it through a variety of tests. At the end of all the tests the jury and the reviewer decide the scores of the cars and which car/company has won. According to where a car finished/how high of a score it got it will be put in the story of how well the car sold and if the public image of the company has gotten better or worse. If a company image becomes too bad, it will go through a decision of the jury for if the company will get a bailout or if it will go bankrupt and possibly be merged into another team with the permission of both teams. Teams can split if a team is large enough to split.
Anyways, layout. After everything the next GridWalk “event” will happen, with what i would say a 5 or 8 year in-game gap. Everything will loop until the last year which is decided in the first ever “event” of GridWalk. At the end of everything, the whole community will choose on the best team/company/player and cars.
The winner will be announced, and then we wait for a bit and the next story and lore will be announced, and it starts all over again. There would probably be a bit more to it, but those are the basics.
Alright, enough of that for now. More detail will come in the actual planning, this is just ideas.
Last time we did this, you could hire engineers which allowed you to not comply to some rules. That was a pretty stupid feature, so that’ll be scrapped.
Another weird thing we had was the characters, but that is something we do need to keep but slightly change.
An example was Richard Nixon, which made announcements about rules and Mr. Topino, which criticized car brands and started scandals, meanwhile he ran his own car company with terrible cars.
There were way more, but only 3 or 4 characters are ideal as more could be confusing, and was confusing.
If we want to do this, we would need a small team of people, probably of around 4 plus a few jury members.
That is all i can think of right now, reply if you have any more questions, if i forgot to answer anything or if you are interested. I really am determined to do this, because i feel like this is a unique and special idea. I am not sure if anyone else has done this before, but if we managed to get this right we could change the variety of challenge choice in automation.
Thanks for reading so much, i really appreciate it.
Again, reply if you are interested or have any questions. You can find me on discord here, and if this happens it will most likely happen here: Brad Lee Garage