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Switch Drift

Project Summary

Team Members

  • 2D Drifting/Zombie survival game made in Unity

  • Unique drifting mechanic

  • Abundant player feedback

  • Interesting combat encounters

Reece Enthoven - Gameplay Design and Programming

Cameron Marable - Game Art

Game Systems

Due to the drifting mechanic being difficult to pick up for some people, a more interactive tutorial was needed. The players start on a dirt area which makes them move slower, and are given many interactive objectives to complete that teach them how to drive. In addition, there are videos sometimes playing in the corner of the screen to help the player visualize what they need to do with the car. These together are able to much more effectively onboard the player
Tutorial
The drifting in switch drift is unique to other drifting games. Rather than pressing and holding a drift key and releasing for boost, the player presses a drift button which starts the drift while giving them a boost. For making this system feel good for the player, lots of feedback and diegetic information is given to the player. When initiating a drift there is camera shake and a boost sound effect for the player to really feel the drift. The car has an orange outline that slowly fills up until the car is ready to start another drift. While drifting above a certain speed, the drift marks the car leaves begin to turn catch on fire, which indicates that the player will instakill any zombie they run into. All these effects combine create a responsive drifting system.
Drifting
Combat
Combat with zombies in Switch Drift is done in 2 distinct ways. The first way is by ramming into them with the car. If this is done while the skid marks are orange, the player will instantly kill the zombie while taking no damage. The other way the player can hurt the zombies is by using the minigun.  The minigun does far less damage than ramming, but has infinite ammo and obviously far more range.

Key Takeaways

My main takeaway from switch drift is that designing for your target audience is really important. All throughout my testing I got extremely polarizing feedback, where people who understood the drifting more intuitively loved it, while those who did not hated it. At first I took this feedback and tried to make the drifting easier to appeal to a wider audience. Instead of increasing the game's appeal, this made it less interesting to the audience that liked the game, while not increasing the appeal to the ones that did not like it enough for them to want to play. Instead of trying to appeal to an audience that would never buy my game, I needed to focus on making the best game possible for the people who actually liked it
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