Jagex recently launched Carnage Racing, the first game from their newly formed US-based studio, on Facebook. It's running on the Unity engine, and features races across 13 different tropical island tracks, with up to 8 players in each race. We caught up with Arash Amini, the producer of Carnage Racing, to find out how the game's launch has gone so far, and what is waiting just around the corner for the racer.
Carnage Racing recently launched on Facebook. How's it going so far? What's the response been like?
The launch has gone great so far, the interest internationally has been really positive, and it is great to see players having so much fun! The response has been really good, we are always open to feedback and have taken note of what the gamers have said and have lots of plans up our sleeves to add even more features to the game in the not too distant future.
So why Facebook? It's not the first place you'd think of putting a game like Carnage.
Facebook has a huge gaming network, and 1 billion users... so I think that speaks for itself. But to give you more details on why we choose Facebook, well... we wanted to be the first of the next gen Facebook games, and show the gamers out there that they can play high quality games without leaving their favourite social network.
The team has only recently been assembled, but I understand there's some pedigree in the ranks. With all that experience, a racer obviously seemed like the way to go forward. How did the team get on with working with the Unity engine?
We have a fantastic team working on the game who, like you say, have worked on some hugely successful games including most recently, the Midnight club series. As for choosing Unity, it was an easy choice. Unity by now is a relatively "simple" engine to get used to, and has some good editing tools. Naturally we have had a small learning curve. As you can see we can render quite amazing visuals using Unity so it does the job perfectly for us!
Racing is clearly at the heart of the game, but there's plenty of Carnage in there too. At what point did you start thinking about adding in the combat?
From the start! We we wanted to build a racing game, and combat is a known fun gaming mechanic. Who doesn't like shooting a missile at another car!
I think the combat gives competitiveness to the gameplay and works well in a social environment where gamers are playing with their friends, and even if they are playing in the world matchmaker, it's still fun racing against other people.
I think that there are other ways to introduce combat, for example the "air" moves... what about increasing their purpose in combat! We have some big plans for future updates in this area so stay tuned.
There's a nice variety of weapons in there. Can you tell us a little bit more about them?
The weapons are the first ranges we thought of putting in to get the players used to combat. We have forward attacking weapons, timed weapons, weapons that bring players back into the races and some speed weapons etc.
I think they provide the gamers with enough action for their first experience, but we are looking into new weapons, there are many defensive weapons we could start to introduce such as oil spills, drop down mines, and spikes to name a few.
There's a lot going on in the different tracks. Where did you draw your inspiration from for some of the designs?
We thought an island would be a great way to encase the gamer into their own unique world, a world that we can build out and add variation to. This is where the idea for an island came from, we definitely wanted to give the gamer a wide range of different looking locations in this environment while also keeping an air of familiarity.
And warp gates! I was skeptical at first, but they work in the context of the game. What was the thinking behind their introduction?
Not naming any other games, but teleport points can prove to be quite fun! And they add some variation to the gameplay, especially when you use then to find different faster routes through the tracks... so we wanted the gamers to have some strategy to their experience so that mastering the tracks wasn't just a simple process of who corners the course the best.
As a Facebook game there's obviously an emphasis on social interaction, how are you encouraging this amongst the community, and what incentives are there for people to keep coming back to the game?
We are being very careful about how much we push the Facebook gamer to interacting with their friends and other gamers. We want it to feel natural, so at the moment gamers can challenge friends and race against them. We are looking at how we can expand the whole challenge aspect and how we can expand this. Along with new races, and maybe team based races in the near future... I think it's all very exciting!
