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LA Rush: Final Thoughts Feature
Derek dela Fuente
19/09/2005
LA Rush's Assistant Producer conveys some of his thoughts on what he calls 'The Longest Mile...'
Very soon you will be able to buy LA Rush which is a racing game with a difference coming out on XBOX and PS2. Derek dela Fuente was a mere spectator as Pall Palsson, Assistant Producer on the game, gave these final thoughts on LA Rush which began with some great lyrics from a Bob Dylan song. Over to Pallā¦.
It's a restless hungry feeling
That don't mean no one no good,
When ev'rything I'm a-sayin'
You can say it just as good.
You're right from your side,
I'm right from mine.
We're both just one too many mornings
An' a thousand miles behind.
From āOne too many morningsā by Bob Dylan
The longest mileā¦
Itās getting close to the end now, just a few short weeks from today I will be able to walk down to my local game store and pick a copy of the game down from the shelfā¦ itās hard to imagine now but weāre very, very, close to the end. The game in question is LA Rush ā“ a game I like to describe as a story driven arcade racing game. Before I start telling you what we are currently putting the final touches on let me tell you a little bit about the game itself starting with its pedigree and inspiration. LA Rush comes from a series of racing games (The Rush series), previously three Rush games have been made: San Francisco Rush, Rush The Rock and Rush 2049 and nowā¦ weāre making L.A. Rush.
āStory driven arcade racing gameā
Itās rather long definition for a game donāt you think? Well, it is by far the best one line description Iāve been able to come up with for this game.
So letās break it down starting with āStory Drivenā: LA Rush has an in depth storyline (supported by beautiful CG scenes) where you play Trikz, a highly accomplished street racer in Los Angeles who has it allā¦ over 35 licensed cars sitting in the garage wing of his mansion, tons of cash in the bank and celebrity friends like the West Coast Customs Crew. When the story starts out Trikz has been cleaned out, a local businessman called Lidell has stolen all his cars (and hidden them around the city) and got corrupt bankers to freeze all of Trikzās assets, all so that Trikz wonāt win the two million dollars that Lidell is putting up for a series of street races. As you progress through the story youāll re-acquire your cars through missions, youāll earn cash by winning races and complete retribution missions by damaging/destroying something that belongs to Lidellā¦ The story is set in the fully free roaming city of angels.
I wonāt give the whole story away here so next up is āarcade racingā: The whole design philosophy for the game is that it is supposed to be āfunā. We didnāt want to make another import tuner game where you need to know which of 20 exhausts will give your car that extra 5 horse power you desperately needā¦ so we went full on arcade. This means that the cars are fast and easy to drive out of the box, forgiving physics will allow you to blow around corners at breakneck speed with relative ease. It also means that the game has some of the biggest jumps seen in a racing game since the last Rush game came out. And if you want to upgrade your car just take it to West Coast Customs and get it pimped out by professionals. Our āarcadeā design philosophy can really be explained in one sentence - āIf there was ever a choice during the design phase between realism and whatās āfunā, realism got the boot every timeā.
One too many mornings
So what are we working on (long into the night) in these final stages of the project? Weāre tuning the game play and fixing bugs. It probably comes as a surprise to the layman that through the project cycle a game will have hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of bugs that need to be fixed before the game ships (PC games sometimes even fix the bugs after the game ships with patches). So the final few weeks before the game goes into manufacturing and distribution are spent frantically fixing all the problems (bugs) and balancing the game play and this is what we are doing now. Some of the bugs weāve had on this project have been outstandingā¦ like this one that we got through yesterday: If you crash your car, flip over and land on your roof in an event entry circle the game crashesā¦ this is extremely hard to doā¦ we had our whole testing department hammering away at this for a whole day and they could not get the car to crash and land on its roof in an event circle. Eventually one of our programmers worked out the problem by reading through the code (heās now at the top of my Christmas gift list).
The other thing thatās done during the last stages of the game are the final game balance/game play tweaks. Iāve seen some games that were unplayable 2 weeks away from ship but are sorted out in the last two weeks before ship and turn out to be great. Thankfully LA Rush has been fun to play for months now and weāre only doing little tweaks in AI performance to get a game difficulty curve right (and if itās not easy/hard enough for you thereās an āeasy-medium-hardā option in the options menu).
My two cents
Iāve done many different things on this project: writing pedestrian dialog, liaising with QA, organizing builds, designing tracks, selecting the music and maintaining documents to name a fewā¦ but lately a lot of my time has been taken up by the press. If you want a game to sell you have to promote it and the best way to do that it to get someone who really knows (and loves) the product to show it to the press and I have to say that LA Rush has been a joy to demo and the reaction has been very positive. Weāve had some very good previews from printed and online press. It seems that every morning someone is sending a link via e-mail around the studio to some good LA Rush coverage. This is what the team has been working for: to make a good game, a fun game that the press and the consumer will enjoy and perhaps most importantly a game thatās great value for money.
Pall Palsson
Assistant Producer
LA Rush
TVG would like to thank Pall Palsson for his final thoughts on LA Rush, we'll have more on the game shortly...
