Night Racer A case study in the small-scale development of a graphically refined game

Abstract

This Bachelor’s thesis details the development of a graphically refined action game by a smallscale development team under a six month time constraint. The goal is to create a visually pleasing game with basic playability and network game capabilities. The resulting game is also meant to be commercially viable, in the sense of having the potential of marketability and being proof of concept as part of a sales pitch. The game in question is a racing game called Night Racer, which is created using Microsoft’s XNA framework with the C# programming language. For making a visually pleasing game easier to develop, the target hardware is decided to be high-performing computers, which allows for large amounts of graphical effects to be implemented. Among the techniques implemented in the game are particle systems, post-processing effects such as bloom, shadows, Phong shading, normal maps, and environment maps. In the development of such a graphically refined game under time constraints, gameplay has to come second, but an extendable game engine is implemented to allow for further development of new, more interesting, game modes. The result is a visually pleasing game, using graphical effects such as particle effects and pulsating light sources to provide a sense of constant screen movement. A multiplayer game mode allows up to four players to compete online, while providing a smooth gaming experience. The game is however very primitive gameplay-wise, and it is the opinion of the authors that developers working under a similar set of conditions that a more complete game engine solution than XNA would allow for further refinement of the graphics, while also allowing more time to be spent on gameplay.