Prototyping the Driving Phase

There’s a lot to do, so let’s dive right into it. Due to the way the driving phase is designed, players must navigate their trucks along a route that’s been pre-determined by the players in the previous game phase. The nature of the overall planned route determines similar overall characteristics of the driving route. Factors such as total transit time, distance, and velocities all fall into that kind of characteristic. Others, such as random encounters along the path, are more localized to a specific portion of the path. The behavior of each encounter is variable, but all will have a general form of forcing the player to make choices to avoid/obtain a collision while piloting their space-truck. Capturing the correlations between the two phases is an important design specification that will be useful – here’s what is listed on the Space-Trucker Issue created for that purpose:

Figure 8.2 –...