Team Dangerlabs

The team for the Dangerlabs app includes such shining stars as:

• Luke Smith - Coding and UI
• Sam Dight - Coding and UI
• Ken T - Art and animation

After our preliminary meetings we have nailed down the core of our app, which is a game based on my driving experiment from the last project. The object of the game will be to survive as long as possible, while being theoretically chased by something. There will be speed brackets in which certain things will happen.

• At low speed, you will lose 'life', meaning the pursuer is getting closer.
• At medium speed, you are safe.
• At high speed, you gain back 'life', a reward for taking the risk.

Crashing into cars will slow you down, depending on the respective properties of the two cars involved, and this will in turn reduce your 'life' giving the pursuer chance to catch up. When your life has run out, it's game over, and your score is the time you were able to survive for.

There will be powerups to collect on the road, like missiles to blow up cars ahead, and advanced vision so you are warned of on-coming cars in particular lanes. There will also be a configuration screen before play, where codes can be entered to unlock different cars, control methods and powerups. These codes must be obtained from the website, and we might try to date-lock them so they only work on that day. We want to achieve viral marketing with this game, and also drive traffic to our main site, so this is the main business strategy of the game.

Byron also mentioned 'renting' unlocks, which you can buy later with points. Perhaps every day there is a different code, usable for that day, which allows people to try out different things in the game. Later on  they could use in game points (or real money if they buy the premium game) to unlock a certain thing permanently. I think this could work well for us.

We are wary of using the microphone too much, so an idea at the moment is to have a boost button that activates the mic and allows you to do an audio speed boost thing. This makes the game more fun and silly and entertaining, but also means the core game can be played in silence or in locations unsuitable for making silly car sounds.

Accelerometer steering and/or acceleration will be tested, and I definitely want accelerometer steering to be an option in that start screen (not an unlock). If it turns out to be much more fun, we will likely make it the default steering method.