New event ideas for racing games.

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People somehow complain that racing games are to much about racing 🥰.There are mini games in many titles. Time trials can be considered racing and is popular. The thing I suggest is a 10 lap time trial.
Another idea I haven't seen is being chased by some type of car crushing creature.
 
I always thought it might be kind of cool if, rather than having basically unlimited cars and garage space, you had to manage a much more limited number and buy and sell vehicles accordingly. Say you'd have to start small and manage your space and collection-maybe when you started off, you'd have a spot for two cars- if you needed another you'd have to wheel another one, until you'd earned enough to have a bigger garage. You could sell your used cars and their upgrades back, less damage and mileage, and make it so there was a used car lot in game so you could find used cars that others had sold back to the game while you were working your way up. To really make it work there would have to be a fairly comprehensive damage and wear system. Gift and prize cars would have to be exempt from the limitation, I would think, but maybe you'd be stuck with them and the only way to get them was to earn them.
 
I wonder if a car setup/tune game would work. You tune your car's suspension (basically) and the game gives you a score or a hot lap time on a given track.
 
Back when Dreams tricked me into thinking I might actually make a game, I had an idea to make a racing game in which anything could happen, from random mechanical failures and animals on the circuit to one-off racing incidents inspired by real life (like a driver being hit by the safety car or the ability to smash through a barrier and into the sea) and some more fantastical ones (natural disasters, plane crashes, protests, etc.), all with vaguely realistic, genuinely random odds so that something may only ever happen for one player, or never at all for anyone.

Obviously, there's a reason games don't tend to do this stuff - it's annoying to lose because of something completely beyond your control - and ultimately I couldn't think of a way to make it fun enough that anyone would actually care enough about it. Like, say you have a seaside circuit and there's a tsunami while you're racing which has the realistic effect of immediately ending the race, would the probably singular person this happens to find that entertaining?

I didn't think so, so I didn't bother.
 
@neema_t Yeah, we all SAY we want realism but do we really? I mean, if realism were a thing, most war games would mostly be sitting around looking for something to paint and cleaning latrines. Although, in the racing game world, dodging 'roos at Bathurst and deer at Road America would be pretty cool the first couple of times. And random fires. We need more fires in racing games.
 
Good points about realism and what we think we want versus what we actually want. I've long felt there needs to be more realism, but the point about losing due to some "random" event that's completely out of our control shows how realism isn't necessarily fun or enjoyable. I mean, if I've spent many hours running a full length championship, with full length races, on the hardest difficulty, only to lose because of some Michael Masi-esque freestyling of the rules on the part of the game, I probably would uninstall it and never play it again.

I've got a few ideas for racing games that AFAIK don't exist, but most of them are probably too niche to be worth a developer doing or are technically unfeasible at the moment.

  • A rally sim with full length stages and the road sections in between, with road traffic and police to pull you over if you're speeding or driving a badly damaged car.
  • A national/club racing simulator that has circuits that don't usually feature in racing games, e.g. Castle Combe, Anglesey and Mallory Park in the UK. Ideally with grassroots events like the Brighton Speed Trials (a quarter mile time trial on closed public road), banger racing and "run what you brung" events.
  • A sim focusing on racing from the dawn of the internal combustion engine to WWII. Very few games include cars from this era, even fewer include the locations. Epic road races that make the Isle of Man TT course look like the Silverstone club circuit, board track racing in America, Brooklands, the Silver Arrows.
  • A realistic open world racer that uses procedural generation to create an infinite world. Obviously this is unrealistic with current technology because recent games that use procedural generation have shown that such games are heavily restricted by the resources the developer has time to create (I'm thinking No Man's Sky where, despite there being 18 quintillion planets, all the ones I visited seem to be the same handful of ideas slightly tweaked over and over again). Perhaps eventually it may be possible to combine Flight Sim-style use of satellite and aerial mapping with AI interpretation to create a reasonably accurate model of the earth?
 
On the realism subject, I see it like this: realism is a bit like a commodity in game design. With the right ideas you can spend it pretty much however you like, but beware of overspending. Realistic details or penalties that would be tedious in combination have been made into successful games in isolation -- all kinds of otherwise tedious things, it seems.

Every choice must be a gameplay design decision. Punitive damage models make much more sense in a rally game than in an exploratory open world game, while the sudden unexpected appearance of traffic is more welcome in the open world game than the rally game.
A sim focusing on racing from the dawn of the internal combustion engine to WWII. Very few games include cars from this era, even fewer include the locations. Epic road races that make the Isle of Man TT course look like the Silverstone club circuit, board track racing in America, Brooklands, the Silver Arrows.
That's a good one. 1000 Miglia: Great 1000 Miles Rally is one of my favorite 2D racing games and that era is begging for attention. So...I want to ask -- know of any good online resources for said cars? 🐺
 
It would be interesting if they added real life race laps/time section. It really would show off the concentration of the job. In the Endurance series you would drive 2-3 hrs at a time. In this busy life it would be hard for me to have time to accomplish,LOL
 
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