Racer Chaser is a knowing nod to two of the biggest brands in gaming. Pac-Man and GTA
THERE’S AN EXTREME CONTRAST BETWEEN THE DRAB LAUNDERETTE AND THE NEON-LIT ARCADE. TOO EXTREME, PERHAPS? We wanted there to be an element of the mundane to the beginning of the game. I’ve had some truly dull jobs in my lifetime, working in factories and kitchens, and like Ashley (the main character), I used to make up games to make the time pass more quickly. So the beginning of the game has the laundrette where everything, including unblocking the toilet, is gamified. There’s a scruffy back room with a few arcade cabs and these make almost the same as doing laundry. These are supposed to be spaces the player wants to get away from. The moment you finally upgrade into your first neon soaked arcade should feel like an achievement in itself. We want the player to feel proud, and like this is a magical oasis away from the drudgery of what’s out front. That same feeling I got as a kid walking into an arcade at the seaside or when the fair was in town. It‘s a place the player is instantly more drawn to. Rather than explicitly telling them via a tutorial to start ignoring the washing we want the realisation to dawn on them naturally that they can concentrate on the fun of the arcade machines themselves. Doing so increases the popularity of machines and means they’re more profitable.
HOW MUCH OF A DEPARTURE WAS AP FROM YOUR PREVIOUS WORK? Although stylistically it’s very different from Vostok Inc
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and The Hungry Horde, all our games are evolutions of similar ideas. We always try to marry a compelling metagame with fun, tactile and immediate, second to second gameplay. In Vostok Inc this took the form of a cookie clicker like idle game as the device that kept players engaged, married with a twin stick shooter cut from the same cloth as Geometry Wars. It worked really well. In Arcade Paradise we take a similar approach but give the player loads more ways to approach not only the active gameplay; here presented as arcade games, but also the overarching metagame; the management of the arcade and laundromat. We even have a lot of actual crossover and nods to our previous games, with lots of call- backs and a shared universe.
The arcade games represent three decades of technology so a lot of effort was placed on getting those details looking right
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