Just bought the Rocket League? There are tips. Rocket League: a detailed guide to the game - how to hit the ball correctly, correct camera settings

22.09.2019

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One hour lecture at the 2016 GDC Developers Conference.

He talked about how a former outsourcing studio came up with the highly successful Rocket League game. Corey also shared the details of the development, the vagaries of launching on multiple platforms and talked about the mistakes the team made on the way to the release.

The DTF editors publish a translation of the speech.

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My name is Corey Davis and I am Senior Designer at Psyonix. I have been working in the company for 10 years, at first I was a programmer, but now I have moved to the design team. In the studio I follow the development of our projects, including the racing game Rocket League. You are probably wondering what the word Psyonix actually means. Blame Dave, he came up with the hard-to-pronounce name for us.

We are an independent studio based in California. Dave got us together, taught us how to work, and we began to carry out tasks under contract for other developers. Prior to the release of Rocket League, Psyonix contributed to the canceled shooter Nosgoth, and previously we touched Mass Effect 3, Gears of War, Bulletstorm and XCOM. We worked with such large projects, but no one heard about us. And when people once again ask how our company immediately achieved such unexpected success, I point out that we have been in the industry for a long time.

So this is what will happen today. Let's start with the history of the company: from 2008, when we released our first independent project, to the release of Rocket League. Then I will talk about the key decisions that influenced the development. During the creation of Rocket League, we faced several times problems, the solutions of which seriously influenced the vector of the development of the game. I will go into more detail about these decisions and explain why I consider them to be one of the key reasons for the success of the Rocket League.

Then we'll talk about certain subtle details and interesting mechanics that hold the game together. I will explain why they work this way and not otherwise.

Then I will try to analyze our success. I'll try to pretend that I somehow understand why Rocket League has become so popular.

In the end, I will share with you the lessons that we learned (or not so much learned) after the release of the game. It has been 9 months since then, but they were completely insane. And I'll tell you what we, as a studio, have learned.

History

This video is by no means a trailer for the Rocket League version for the N64 console. It's actually Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars, the worst-named game ever. And I regret that we came up with this name every time I have to say it.

This is our game, we didn't steal anything. We released it in 2008 on PlayStation Network and most people have never heard of it. Learn about her by reading articles about the Rocket League. And here's the thing: it scores 67 out of 100 on the Metacritic rating aggregator.

The game is pretty much the same as Rocket League and has such a low score. And when I looked closely at the Metacritic page, I suddenly noticed that our Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars was in the list of the 100 best games on the Playstation 3 console in 2008, at 92nd place.

You will say that we were simply obliged to make the second game after such a success. But then we did not understand this, and did not know what mistakes we made, what could be done better. This was our first game, and we were just a small independent studio that was also working on Gears of War at the time.

But we learned that the people who got caught up in Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars loved it very much. Few knew about it, but those who knew wrote us letters, spoke very well about it, and some are still playing, which for a 2008 project without any advertising is quite impressive.

Back then, we introduced support for uploading videos to YouTube, and countless cool video edits appeared on the web, just like it is now happening with the Rocket League.

And even then we realized that during the development we made several mistakes. We, like many players, loved this game, but almost no one heard of it. Therefore, it was worth investing in marketing and bringing it to mind.

In addition, we realized that the players on the Playstation 3 were playing a completely different game from the one we played in the office. We played it on computers at 60 frames per second, connected via a local network, and they - God forbid, at 30 frames per second via the Internet. Which led to constant signal delays and freezing of the image on the screen. Such problems can turn off many.

In general, several years have passed. The year 2011 has come.

This is the World Battle Car League, a great name, isn't it? A greedy restart of the game. In 2011, everyone did that. But, in fact, then we noticed that many games like Monday Night Combat began to go into the steppe that is now called esports. And we understood that our idea would be perfect for this. But it's hard to do something without a publisher and an adequate budget.

I wanted to make the second game better and more realistic. Many hours spent developing the concept and thinking through the scale were wasted. We even come up with realistic stadiums.

Then there were too many changes to the game, it left the original concept, but we never managed to create a normal and interesting prototype. And in Psyonix, it's almost a death sentence. Working on the game was just boring: we made changes, changed cars, changed the physics model, and just got confused.

We tried to find a publisher, but nobody accepted the game and I can't blame them for that. Plus, over time, I realize that the game was trying to get ahead of its time. In 2011, esports was gaining momentum, but has not yet reached the level that we see now.

So we did what all the developers loved to do at the time: we started developing an open world game. Our lead technical artist is a real wizard who could create an open world, which we decided to take advantage of.

We assumed that the player would be able to do a lot of different things. He, of course, could go to the stadium to play football, but that was one of the options. The idea is good, but, perhaps, overwhelming for a small studio. There were only 15 of us then. We started to come up with different races and mini-games.

The scale of the game grew, we could no longer stop it. We had to pay attention to every element and mechanic, and as a result, no aspect of the game reached the level of quality we wanted. And physics, which was perfect for playing football, was not very suitable for other activities. We made it specifically for jumping and flying around the arena - when with the same physics the car started jumping over the hills, nothing good came of it.

Rocket league

Finally, we came to the development of the Rocket League. At that time, however, it was not called that. We decided we wanted to make the game that SARBPC was supposed to be - yes, that's the official abbreviation. Possibly the worst acronym of all time. We created a small team that could work without distracting the entire studio at once.

We gave up unnecessary mechanics, we just wanted to bring the main idea to mind. It should have turned out to be a soccer game with cars that people would play on dedicated servers. Our task was to create the first alpha prototypes as soon as possible. And we were going to make the game shareware.

The year was 2013, the shooter Team Fortress 2 and the team game Dota2 were on the wave of success, no one was wrong when they made a free game on personal computers.

We thought that it was worth creating a free-to-play game, the money would be piled in buckets to the door of our office.

What changed?

We are often approached and asked: “You did almost exactly the same game, but you got a completely different result. So what exactly is the difference? "

Firstly, this time the matches are held on dedicated servers. This is a very big change. But in 2008 we couldn't afford something else. Signal latency between players was a really big problem. From the very beginning, we needed dedicated servers for the Rocket League.

Secondly, we almost got to 60 frames per second even on Playstation 4. For a game where every second counts, every fraction of a second, a high refresh rate is a must. The first game on the Playstation 3 was played at such a low frame rate that it just felt bad, too wooden. Much more woody than the PC version we played.

Thirdly, we have greatly improved the matchmaking system. But I will not go into details, I will just say that we have made a rating system that selects opponents for the player with a suitable skill level. The system turned out to be very flexible.

And, also, we have expanded the possibilities for customizing cars. This is essential for any competitive sports game. And besides, everyone loves hats.

And of course, we spent two years fine-tuning all our ideas and mechanics. There is nothing groundbreaking here, but when discussing development, people often forget how important it is. And not everyone can afford to spend two years improving every aspect of the game. But we could: the contract work brought the company enough money for us to work on the game in peace.

Our experience as an outsourcing studio played a very important role at this stage. We saw how other companies work, we understood a lot - what is worth doing and what is not. We've seen development teams get tired of endless stand-ups and meetings more than once. We've also honed our knowledge of the Unreal 3 engine to perfection. We seemed to know everything about him: all the stupid things that he sometimes throws out, all the dark magic on which he worked.

We've also honed our own development process. Before Rocket League, we made a game for the iOS platform called ARC Squadron. Then a lot of effort was invested in bringing it to mind. And critics praised the game, received it well, but sold poorly.

Many people come to GDC and talk about their successes, but few mention failures. We personally started developing and abandoned a huge number of projects. There were a lot of them, but that's perfectly normal.

Game development is tricky. Everyone makes mistakes, but if you can learn from those mistakes, then everything is fine.

Two problems were particularly acute for us.

First, while the development team was growing, we often lost control of the situation, everyone had their own opinion, their own wishes, which were difficult to satisfy. And this is a big problem.

Secondly, due to the large size of the team, we often could not understand and decide what we were creating. But in the case of the Rocket League, from the very beginning it was clear what we were working on and where we were heading. Therefore, everyone clearly understood what needs to be done at each specific point in time at each stage of development.

Key Decisions

First, our game is pretty simple at its core. Somehow we decided that in the Rocket League the cars will not have characteristics. And many, coming into the game, ask the question: why do cars have no characteristics? "I want my car to have performance, I want a car that is more suitable for standing at the gate."

But, the fact is that we did not have characteristics in the first game, and we, as it were, are fundamentally opposed to such an approach. Rocket League is a simple yet very dynamic game. In 3 seconds, the player can leave the goalkeeper's position and attack the enemy gate. And if the cars were divided according to their characteristics, it would interfere with such an important concept. We just felt that it was wrong to introduce different types of machines.

We decided to abandon the characteristics, but this did not become an obvious decision for us. We were really worried about this because the reviews for the first game stated that it lacked depth. But we simply didn't have enough time to test the version of the game with different cars with different characteristics. That is, in the end, our "brilliant" solution was born from a lack of time.

Secondly, we were very worried that players might simply not be impressed with a single game mode. Doing just the football mode was dangerous. But we, again, did not have enough time to work out something else. And when the game came out, if you think about it, we had already been working on football for over 7 years. Later we released additional modes as special events and it worked out well. However, at the development stage, things did not look so obvious.

Thirdly, there was a long debate inside the studio about the number of stadiums. As a result, we decided that we will leave one type of arenas. In SARPBC there were different stadiums, up to the "bagels", which had to drive the ball towards the opponent's goal. But when we began to interview players, we realized that most people prefer to play on a map called Urban, which became the basis for the playing field in the Rocket League. Therefore, we decided that we would not waste energy and resources on creating different maps if players still prefer our version of de_dust.

This solution gave us several advantages: we again managed to concentrate our forces on one thing, worked out every corner, every meter of the field. We spent a lot of time creating a map, and if we had to create multiple maps, we would not have reached this level of quality. Some veterans of the series did not like this, they did not understand why the second version of the game had less content than the first. But everyone had to come to terms with this minus.

Not a free game

We are often approached and asked how the studio got the courage to make the game paid. And this is a very good question.

We were originally going to release Rocket League as a free-to-play version. Then everything was logical, this approach seemed a logical way out for a strange game about cars kicking a ball. We also needed to build a large player base as soon as possible for the matchmaking system to work properly. We looked at Valve and thought it would be easy.

Here is a real screenshot from an early version of the game.

At the time, Rocket League had a whole crafting system. Players could collect parts and create parts for cars from them. And we threw it all out when we decided that our game would not be free-to-play, although we spent a lot of effort on developing the system.

In the summer of 2014, VP of Marketing Jeremy Don convinced everyone that this approach would be a mistake, for which many thanks to him. We realized that developing a full-fledged paid game would have a better impact on the game itself and on our reputation. We were able to focus on the game rather than thinking about a free-to-play system. We then almost turned from game designers to monetization designers. We had to work not to make the players better, but to make them pay more.

Freedom: Finally, we can think about how we can make Rocket League as high quality as possible.

We were also worried that if we took the free-to-play route, Rocket League would hardly be able to distract people from big projects if they didn't initially invest a little in the game. If you think about it, you get a very interesting psychology.

And, unexpectedly, calculations have shown that making the game paid, and not free, will simply be more profitable. The average profit per free-to-play user on a PC is from one to four dollars. And we thought, based on the popularity of the last game and hoping for help from Sony, that we would be able to sell at least 50 thousand copies for $ 20. Even according to calculations, betting on a paid game seemed more profitable. In the case of free-to-play, selling enough car hats would be tricky.

Here is a slide from one of our meetings.

Please note that in the end we spent twice as much on development. But according to these estimates, we realized that in order for the game to at least pay off, it was necessary to sell at least 2 million hats, or at least 56 thousand copies of the game.

Required mechanics

The game was originally slated to launch in November 2014, six months earlier. But we knew that there were mechanics that needed to be completed before the game was released.

We realized quite late that we couldn't launch the game without a command system. Now this is obvious for multiplayer games, but then we did not immediately understand how important it is to allow players to get together with friends. When it became clear that we needed this system, it turned out that there was not even any foundation for its creation. I had to develop it from scratch, it took a lot of time.

We knew that the development of team mechanics would force us to postpone the release of the game, but we decided to take a chance. And the risk paid off in the end, although we spent a decent chunk of the extra budget and pushed back the release date.

The second mechanic was the matchmaking system. When we were still trying to release it in November, it worked differently than it does now. I will not go into details, but we decided to change it, and now the system directs all players to one server, which selects a worthy opponent for each. I had to build the infrastructure from scratch, it worked out well, but, of course, it almost burned out after the game was released.

These two mechanics have become an integral part of the game, allowing players to gather with friends and fight against opponents of a similar level. But just for their sake, I had to postpone the release and seriously inflate the budget. It was a risk, but it was worth it. I understand that not everyone can afford such a risk, but if possible, then do not be afraid.

Platforms

Many people do not know that we originally intended to release Rocket League on Playstation 4 and Playstation 3. When we were developing the game, the latter was still selling well enough, but we soon realized that we simply would not be able to optimize the game so that it could work normally on the old one. prefix. And on the Steam site, we were going to launch the game "later". But at the last minute, the decision was made to make the Rocket League for personal computers as soon as possible.

And that was the best decision we've ever made. If you were interested in Rocket League sales data, then you know that in the first month the game was handed out on PlayStation + for free, and it was downloaded by 6 million people. We were scared that we would not be able to pay for enough servers to make them enough, but the sale of the game on Steam paid for all the costs of maintaining the infrastructure. And besides, Steam pays very quickly, which is very important. And I have no idea how we would have coped if we launched the game only on the PlayStation 4 and gathered such a number of users.

Non-obvious facts

Special physics

Ball-machine interactions in Rocket League do not work according to standard physics rules. We didn't use Unreal's built-in physics. The problem is that "real" physics works too randomly and unpredictably, which already sounds strange for physics-based "esports". But in fact, from such a game one would like to expect a certain consistency in hitting the ball by the car, and real physics behaves too strangely.

We wanted the system to follow the player's original intent, not real physical rules. That is, if a player places the ball between his car and the goal, hitting the projectile should send it into the goal, and not in a random direction - depending on how it bounces off the car.

But this is not obvious, it would seem that if the game is based on physics, it should work clearly and according to the rules. However, with our physics, the game was calmly balanced the way we needed it. If real physics were used, it would behave accordingly - very complicated and confusing. If you hit the ball at high speed, it bounces off you with great force. And if the ball and the car are rapidly flying towards each other, then we do not always need the entire force of the collision to influence their interaction.

Now take a look at a picture of the incredibly thoughtful hitbox of the car.

Yes, it's just a box. And this is also strange, it may seem that in such a serious competitive game you need to strive for absolute accuracy. But, in this case, again you have to sacrifice predictability. It is very important that a player who hits the ball at a certain angle always gets more or less the same result. And we realized that although the hitbox (the area around the object model, hitting which registers the fact of a collision of two objects - ed.) In the form of a box seems strange and imprecise, it gives clear and predictable results in a collision.

Here is an example of how fake physics works.

On the left is an example of real physics. Where the ball will fly depends on the speed of the car, the angle of impact, the speed and direction of the ball. It seems to be nothing bad, such a system sounds quite predictable. But our system, an example of which is shown on the right, works more clearly. The vector between the ball and the car always points to where the player's camera is looking. That is, a player, in order to score a goal, must look at the goal and kick the ball towards the goal. It's simple and straightforward, and experienced players know what to expect in certain situations.

When development first started, we didn't have this simple model yet. In fact, we wanted to make Rocket League more realistic than the first game. And realistic physics has its advantages.

For example, if you imagine a large soccer ball hitting your car, you would imagine that it should roll up the bumper. And then, having picked it up with a bumper, you will be able to bypass opponents. But in the final model, the ball will just bounce off the car - it looks more like ping-pong than real physics. But we thought the catching system might be cool and interesting and showed it to our alpha testers. They didn't like it very much.

They remembered how physics worked before and couldn't get used to the new model. She was different, and different is always bad. But in part, their displeasure was understandable. The system has lost the predictability it had since the first game. We read the reviews and realized that although we got a complex and interesting system, we lost consistency and predictability.

Now I want to show you my favorite quote. These words were spoken two months before the release of the game.

This game is based on the greed of the developers and the lazy design. This is exactly how it is, and I really hope that it will fail. There are too many good independent games out there whose developers think and respect their customers. And because Rocket League simply does not deserve success.

Ironically, in the end, the veteran began participating in and winning the Rocket League competitions. So he apparently gave up on his words.

But here's what we ran into shortly before the release of the game. Everyone is now saying that Psyonix is a great studio that listens to their players, but even our longtime fans weren't sure if we should be trusted back then. They didn't know if we were doing the right thing.

And here is one example of what things players are capable of using the strange physics of the Rocket League. When we see something like this, we are always very surprised, because none of us is capable of such a thing. It's just incredible. Videos like this are constantly appearing on the Reddit forum, thanks to the predictable physical system.

Unexpected skills

If you haven't played Rocket League, I'll explain. The player can double jump by pressing the A button twice. And if during the second jump he presses the button of a certain direction, the car rolls in that direction. That is, the player can jump backward, forward or sideways.

And we almost accidentally changed this mechanic so that the second jump uses a sharp fading momentum, rather than a gradual acceleration, as it was in the first game, the name of which I will not pronounce. And our solution had an unexpected result.

Here's an example of how I am using this trick incorrectly.

I got to the ball correctly, but I used the second jump too early. As a result, the ball flew past the goal, because it lost its initial momentum before it hit.

And here's how to do it.

Aside from the slightly different trajectory, this time I used the momentum from the second jump in time, so I hit the goal.

Initially, we thought it would be better to fix this error. Because the game was doing something that it shouldn't be doing. But then we realized that the ability to do something like that is an indicator of a player's abilities. Experienced users can hit the ball harder and more accurately, but for this you need to use the second jump very carefully and at the right time.

At the same time, beginners do not know that this is generally possible. During the development of Rocket League, our goal was to create a game that newbies could understand. And for them the game seems slow enough for them to understand what's going on, but the same veterans are playing at high speeds.

It also adds tactical depth to the game. After all, in order to crank a trick with an enhanced blow, you need to sacrifice the initial impulse of flight, abandoning the double jump.

The magic of zero seconds

We almost accidentally added a zero second mechanic to the first game. The point is that when the timer reaches 0 seconds, the match does not end until the ball touches the ground. It may seem that this is something very small, but it is not. Because the mechanics again allows you to do very interesting tricks. And it also enriches the game at a competitive level.

Final of the first major Rocket League tournament.

We watched the ending of that match live in the office and it was incredible. The magic of zero seconds has been in the game for a very long time, but it never ceases to delight us. But at first glance, it does not seem to be something big, because it appeared not thanks to a design document, but simply thanks to the idea of one person. And it seems to me that it is precisely such small decisions and mechanics that give the games a taste.

Destruction of machines

Destruction is a highly controversial topic of discussion. I don't have a video on this, but the essence of the mechanics is that if one car crashes into another at high speed, the second explodes. Doesn't sound good, right? In the first game, this mechanic was poorly balanced, it generally stayed there, as a reminder that we originally made a game about fighting cars, not about football.

The player is not punished in any way for blowing up an enemy vehicle, and in a sense, the ability to destroy the enemy generates violent and aggressive behavior. But the mechanics remained in place.

The best players began to use the opportunity to blow up the enemy as a strategic tool, for example, against teams that are too fond of all together at the gate. And for less experienced players, it became an outlet. We are often told something like: "I cannot score, but I can blow up the cars of opponents."

I don't know how unbalanced this mechanic is, but even if it is, then perhaps such features should not always be removed from the game? Even if we weren't sure about the decision, we just started watching the reactions of the players. And they liked it.

Quick chat

We've added the ability to share quick messages while in-game almost at the last minute, about one to two months before release. Before the game was released, we cut the system, but added it back after a couple of weeks. As you can see in the photo above, the prepared phrases have become a meme. And we added quick chat only because we were worried that players would spend time on messages right during the game.

And I want to believe that quick chat has had a beneficial effect on the game's community because it makes it easy to praise a team member after they score a goal.

Analysis of success

Now I will try to pretend a little that I know why we were successful.

The first reason is the state of the market. The way people are now watching a variety of video content. In 2008, Twitch did not exist, and YouTube was very different. I will always be proud of this: somehow we overtook League of Legends in terms of the number of viewers for a short period of time. As far as YouTube goes, I really love these horrible pictures on the video covers. Just look at them.

But there are people: video creators, streamers, who need our games to gather viewers. And for us it is actually free advertising. We spent exactly zero dollars on traditional advertising methods. All of our ads consisted of company on Twitch, YouTube and cross-over.

Secondly, the Reddit forum has become an important reason for our success. More specifically, the Playstation 4 subreddit advertised us during the beta test so that players paid attention to Rocket League even before its release.

The footage of the game filled the forum, and for a long time nothing but the Rocket League appeared on it. Streamers started to contact us, they asked for beta keys, because they saw the game there.

And that's how it all began. And I can't even explain how important it is to actively communicate with the community of your game.

cybersport

Esports is becoming more and more important. Interestingly, the popularity of the first game in narrow circles gave us a ready-made professional scene for the Rocket League. Before, there was a problem that if you suddenly do not know how you can play football in cars at all, you will not understand that it is possible at all. In some reviews for the game, it was written that the ball and cars behave too unpredictably, and, accordingly, the game turns out to be not so interesting.

But since the launch of Rocket League, from day one, people like streamer Kronovi have been streaming on Twitch, and potential players have seen what tricks a pro can do. And they wanted to learn the same thing. They saw that all of this was possible, and that the game could be esports. In addition, the audience is used to watching cool videos from tournaments or just interesting moments from the match. This is fine now, but it wouldn't have worked in 2008.

Today, even a small indie game can get some publicity. People are interested in these games. The market has changed, now small games have a much better chance of getting noticed.

Congenital virality

It's a bit of a wacky term, but Rocket League has something that makes it very easy to creep on social media. It is very easy to cut animations from what is happening in the game, and even an uninformed player can understand what is happening on them. He will be able to wonder and admire. But, for example, in the case of the MOBA genre, a person unfamiliar with the game will not understand anything at all. Even if you have not played Rocket League, you understand what happened in the videos that I showed.

The game itself took over the subreddit, not a cent was spent on it. We didn’t give out keys from fake accounts, nothing like that. The community organized an advertising campaign for us.

Rocket League is a game in which the basic rules are fairly easy to grasp, but it will take years to fully master it. And it's fun to play at any skill level. Initially, we were afraid that new players might be put off by the complexity and the understanding that they can't do anything. But it turned out that even beginners are very interested in playing, losing with the whole team. And thanks to the system of selection of honest opponents.

And seeing what good players can do, newcomers were inspired. Here is one of my favorite snippets.

But then, when we only had the first game, people just didn't believe that something like this was possible in some random indie craft. As you can see, as the skills of the players grow, they get the opportunity to do incredible things, and not alone, but with a team.

Twitch

Twitch was another important ingredient in success. We didn't do it on purpose, but Rocket League turned out to be a very suitable game for streamers. Battles between popular players happened on their own. One streamer could challenge another to a duel, and so on.

And we distributed the game to everyone on the condition that they broadcast. And they kept their promise. But we didn't pay them. We didn't buy anyone because I personally hate to think of these people as marketing machines. We just gave them keys if they wanted to, went to their broadcasts, answered questions.

The extra time matches were fun to watch, the viewers in the Twitch chat were very funny and enthusiastic about what was happening. We, as developers, challenged popular streamers to play against us. And all of Twitch turned against the developers.

PS Plus

For many, this is a rather controversial issue. There is no clear confidence that the PS Plus service can somehow help the developer. But in our case, PS Plus turned out to be a useful system. Rocket League spread across Reddit and Twitch, and a person who saw the game and became interested in it could download and watch it for free with their own eyes.

It really helped us. Rocket League remained paid, but managed to catch a free-to-play audience. At the same time, we made a profit using Steam and received a large number of free audiences.

Good time to release the game

There are factors that influenced the success of the game, to which we have no direct relation. Not many games came out in the summer of 2015. And we thank the marketing department that specifically chose this time to release the game. There were not so many titles in the catalog of games on PS4, and each new release became a real event. We didn't have to knock on the doors of news sites and blogs, because they themselves needed an informational occasion to write about.

The game was very visible on the console, which fueled its popularity on the Steam service. The press wrote about us completely free of charge and so much that it was already comical. If I'm not mistaken, Kotaku published articles about us for 19 days in a row, as if the site had nothing else to write about. And all because we chose the right time for the release.

An indie developer might make the mistake of thinking that he doesn't have to worry about big games that he doesn't have a rival to. It may seem to him that there is nothing wrong with releasing the game in parallel with giants like Call of Duty or Destiny, because they have a completely different audience. But this is not so. Social media, news sites, and streamers have a limited amount of attention. Therefore, a good moment for release can help a game to find success, and a bad moment can cause it to fail.

Luck

Very often people come here and say that you just have to make a good game and you will get the success you deserve. But it’s not, luck matters too.

I will not go into great psychological details, but when analyzing my own success, it is very important not to succumb to the temptation "" or something like that. We used to pay attention only to what brought us success, but maybe there were already ten similar Rocket League out there that failed.

We may have just gotten lucky and released the game at the right time. The success of one game does not mean that a similar game, made according to the same rules, will necessarily find success.

Even if we ourselves try to repeat the trick. Sometimes, ordinary luck can seem like a sign of genius, even when it isn't.

However, it is within the developer's power to maximize the likelihood of his own success. You can plan your release carefully. And you can also build into the game the ability to share some information about the game, cool moments with friends, so that the game can creep on its own.

What have we understood?

Our biggest challenge was the scale we accidentally reached. During development, we assumed that a maximum of 10 thousand players would play it at the same time. But the number got to 180 thousand, which is about 35 times the maximum simultaneous number of players in the beta test.

Our server room was literally on fire. But I don't know how you can prepare for this at all, at the time of beta the numbers were not even close to that high. We couldn't load our own servers so much, even for testing. I cannot give any advice on this. Just try to get ready. And be prepared to stay awake at night.

The second big problem was the need to release patches on multiple platforms. If you've ever had to do something like this, then you know how awful it is. Different times for certification and the release of the patch make it very difficult to play between different platforms. We hope this will become more common practice soon, especially with the upcoming release of Rocket League on Xbox One. But, one way or another, your producers will go crazy about this, and all sorts of things will constantly be postponed. We had to delay the release of patches on the PC until Sony finished certifying the patches on the PlayStation. The same goes for the release of the DLC: each time we had to wait for Sony's approval 10 working days.

If you have played Rocket League, then you know that we are not shy about stuffing different icons and cars into the game as advertisements. We can cram anything into the game, if thanks to this we can also advertise ourselves. More recently, for example, we added the DeLorean and the Batmobile to the game.

Rocket League doesn't have any hard setting or plot, but we are afraid that we will not become a game, but a platform for advertising cars. I cannot say that we have any rigid internal restrictions on this, but we constantly monitor ourselves.

A growing community

Another challenge for us was adapting to the ever-growing community of the game. We started with 10,000 concurrent players, and with so many users it was easy and enjoyable to interact through the forums and Twitter. It is easy to answer questions, communicate with users, and so on. But as the number of players grew, this level of interaction became impossible.

It's just physically unrealistic to answer the questions of 180 thousand interested players. And this can put you in a bad light: unexpectedly, developers are no longer so easy to get in touch, they don't communicate much with the public. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to this problem, but it is important to make every effort to minimize the impact. We cannot answer all the questions, but we do our best.

DLC sale

Initially, it seemed that selling DLC would be easy. We gave them the game for free, so we decided that they would be happy to buy additional content. In fact, DLC is selling much better on Steam than on PS4.

And the point is that if the player has already bought the game, he is more likely to agree to spend a little more on it. And the one who received the game for free will not find in his head a reason to suddenly spend money on it.

What would we like to do differently

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The idea of stuffing jet-powered cars under a Mad Max 3-style dome, and even making them play some kind of soccer equivalent, sounds like crazy crazy. But, surprisingly, this idea works! The Rocket League game by Psyonix, the successor to the good Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars six years ago, teaches you to find a certain primitive pleasure in turning on acceleration and, performing somersaults, crashing into an ice cream truck. The highlight is that such antics are closely intertwined with the main tasks: controlling a huge ball and building ingenious defensive and attacking tactics. Fast and agile gameplay makes Rocket League so fun that even the unstable operation of the game servers doesn't get in the way of your enjoyment.

In the main game mode, two teams converge on the arena, each of which has three cars (but one on one, two on two and four on four, you can also compete), very different in appearance, but equal in their characteristics. And they all rush across the field, pushing the local huge analogue of a soccer ball. Moreover, the coolest thing is that you don't need to know anything about racing games or football simulators at all - there are rules here, and they are very simple. All that is required of you is to rush with all your dope across the bright neon arenas, do tricks and try to score the bouncing ball from everything to the right place.

This incessant movement is the essence of the Rocket League. And in many ways it is achieved due to local modified physical laws, boldly flirting with gravity and inertia, allowing you to both rush along the walls and ceiling of the arena, and turn around in the air right in the middle of a jump, which in the real world, of course, would quickly turn the brains of a racer in a gray slurry. And all these tricks are so addictive and give cool sensations in the spirit of slot machines that sometimes you have to almost beat yourself on the hands, so as not to forget to put on the brakes when success requires just a neat hit on the ball.

However, bright tricks and a chaotic jumble of metal are just a screen, an upper level behind which strategic potential is hidden. The first press of the jump button allows you to soar into the air, while the second press (in combination with the chosen direction) results in a somersault, a barrel, or, as it is called in football, a scissor strike through yourself. It may seem that all this is too simple, and, in part, it is. But think about the fact that you need to hit at the exact moment, on an insanely jumping ball, and even correctly calculate its trajectory and possible ricochet from surfaces. There is where to show your skills. Sometimes, when you react correctly to a hit from a partner from around the corner, at the right moment you put on the brake, make a barrel and deliver an accurate shot on goal, perfectly catching the moment, you feel damn cool and happy. It captures the spirit.

Aside from the insane, heady match-making process, the Rocket League has little to offer the player. The development system here is limited only by the discovery of new stupid cars, and cosmetic additions to them - for this, of course, you need to win and complete special tasks.

Of course, dressing up a car in a sombrero may seem funny, but it's sad that in fact there is almost no difference in terms of behavior on the playing field between sports cars, trucks, various exotic models and an ice cream truck (available only in the PS4 version). this tinsel process does not affect in any way. Probably, this allows you to equalize the chances in multiplayer matches, but I still prefer the essence of the cars to be much closer to their real prototypes: let the sports cars drive fast, but be difficult to control, vans and trucks should be slow, but strong and well suited for defense, and between all this there would be intermediate, balanced options. Thus, the player would be much more attached to his favorite cars, and it would be more interesting to form a team for one match or a whole sequence of them. But the developers decided to go the other way.

Yes, there is no sensible development with the discovery of new machines with amazing characteristics. But this is fully compensated by the fact that the player himself always has something to learn, mastering the subtleties of control and the physical model. Whether you prefer standalone online ranked matches, simple demo races, 4-player co-op on the same screen, or a full 36-week competitive season, Rocket League is cool enough to keep you hooked and always hungry for more.

Leaderboards reflect your stats and allow comparisons with players around the world. But the servers designed to provide matches (including cross-platform, for players with both PC and PS4) do their job very mediocre, working every other time. Fortunately, Rocket League boasts good artificial intelligence for both teammates and opponents, so the game loses almost nothing when disconnected from the network. And this is important, because sometimes the servers cannot be reached.

Are you tired of FIFA, in which only the number changes with each part? Are you tired of the crazy number of racing simulators that are so similar to their predecessors? Then I bring to your attention the 2015 product from Psyonix: Rocket League. In this article I will tell you about it, what you can do in it and why you should pay attention to it, discarding my prejudices about some genres. Let's get started ...

Wire

Somewhere in the Psyonix office:
-Hey Dave! What kind of vidocq have you watched the football championship all night?
- Not only, but also celebrated the victory of the national team. How did you pass the evening?
- A pack of chips, a TV set and an incomparable rally.
At that moment, Dave let out a dull cough like a quack.
- Something? Repeat the last words?
-Back of chips ...
-No, no, later.
- Rally?
“Not a word more, call the committee. And grab my Sombrero.

What is the game like?

Not otherwise, a mixture of two genres: football and racing, wrapped in colorful packaging. It's time to unfold it and taste this creation. First of all, you should not consider this mix separately, but should be perceived as a completely new direction.

A countdown is given. 3 ... 2 ... 1 ... The start signal sounded. Your opponents are in all weapons, your team is at the ready. The fans in the stands cheer, the stadium is in floodlights, the lawn is cut short and the ball languishes in the center of the pitch.

The aim of the game is simple: strike with the sword, enjoy yourself and help the team to become the leader. On the battlefield, each team has its own zone and gate. The more goals are scored, the closer you are to success. You say that this is understandable, because in football the same thing. But ... there are no rules. Crash, hit the enemy's side, knocking out the remnants of the dope from him, fly on turbo boosters and do various tricks.

Own experience

If I had not played about 50 hours in this game, I would not have written an article.

At first, in truth, not everything was so colorful. I spawned at the stadium, where serious opponents and my "dear teammates" were waiting for me. I will not bother you with the details of the loss. At the beginning, I came up with a new name for the game: "Ball Missing Simulator". But after a dozen hours I got used to it and became, at least, not the worst player. I enjoyed a game that allowed me to reveal myself in every mode: 1v1, 2v2, 3v3, 4v4, snow day, basketball, dropshot (breaking the opponent's floor) and much more.

First of all, I was amazed that there is a level in the game, that is, I could gain experience and thereby earn myself a certain title, which I could boast of in front of the enemy.
Later I realized that these "titles" are not the Apogee.

Please love and respect: competitive mode. Here it was possible to show oneself both from the best side and not from a very good side ... At first it was "not very good". The ranking system allowed you to match opponents of your skill level: from calibration to champion.

Let's talk about the chips of the game

One of the features of the game is the presence of customization of the car, well, or tuning, as you like more. But you can not only give the car a new look, but turn it into Sergei Zverev. For example: stick a unicorn horn or a pink cap on the roof of a car (I'm afraid to remember something else), replace the usual antenna with an alien's head. Rainbow instead of nitro, flowers on the case, all this and not only awaits you and your perverted imagination.

Another important feature is mobile inventory. You can exchange an item (trade) with the player, exchange 5 items of the same quality for a better one in the garage and open cases (well, we know who is the spiritual heir in this part), which can be opened for keys, while the proceeds go to the prize pool games, which allows it to become one of the esports disciplines of the future.

Lecture by senior designer of the development studio

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At the 2016 GDC Developers Conference, Psyonix Senior Designer Corey Davis spoke with a lecture on the development of the Rocket League racing game.

He talked about the past projects of Psyonix studio and about the difficulties of launching on multiple platforms, explained why the "fake" physics works in Rocket League and what helped the game become popular.

My name is Corey Davis and I am Senior Designer at Psyonix. I have been working in the studio for 10 years, at first I was a programmer, but now I have moved to design. I follow the design of our projects, including the Rocket League. You probably want to know what Psyonix is. I usually blame Dave ( Psyonix head Dave Haguewood - approx. ed.) that he came up with a difficult to pronounce name for us.

We are an independent studio based in California. Dave got us together, taught us how to work, and we became a studio that works under contract for other companies. Our last job is Nosgoth, before that we participated in the development of Mass Effect 3, Gears of War, Bullet Storm and X-com. We worked with these games, but no one heard about us. And when people once again ask how we immediately achieved such success, I explain that we have been in the industry for a long time.

First, I'll tell you about the history of the company: from 2008, when we made our first own game, and ending with the release of the Rocket League. I will list the key decisions that influenced the development. During the creation of the game, we were faced with important questions - the answers to them were supposed to direct the development in one direction or another. It seems to me that the decisions made were one of the reasons for the success of the game.

Then I'll explain what I call "non-obvious facts." There are mechanisms in the game that do not work at all as it might seem. I'll tell you why we made them exactly like this. Then I'll try to analyze our success, pretending to at least roughly understand why everything happened the way it did. In the end, I'll talk about the lessons that we learned (or not quite learned) after the release of the game. Nine months have passed since then, but they were completely insane.

History

This is not a trailer for the Rocket League port on the Nintendo 64. In fact, this is Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars, the worst-named game in history. I wish we came up with this name every time I have to say it.

This is our game, we didn't steal anything. We released it in 2008 on PlayStation Network and most people have never heard of it. Learn about this game by reading articles about the Rocket League. The fact is that she received 67 points out of 100 on the Metacritic rating aggregator.

The game is pretty much the same as Rocket League and has such a low score. When I looked closely at the Metacritic page, I suddenly noticed that our game was ranked 92nd on the PlayStation 3 100 Best Games in 2008. You will say that after such success, we were simply obliged to make the second game, but for us it was not so obvious. We didn't know what mistakes we made and what could be done better. This was our first game, the first game from a small independent studio that was also working on Gears of War at the time.

But we learned that Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars players loved it a lot. Few knew about the game, but those who knew wrote us letters with very good reviews. Some people still play it today, which is quite impressive for a project from 2008 that is not supported by any advertising.

Even then, we realized that during the development we made several mistakes. We should have invested in marketing and polished the game. In addition, we realized that the owners of the PlayStation 3 saw a very different game that we played in the office. We played Rocket League on computers at 60 frames per second, connected via a local network, and they - God forbid, at 30 frames per second via the Internet.

Several years have passed, and 2011 has come.

This is the World Battle Car League. Great title, right? A greedy restart of the game. In 2011, everyone did that. In fact, in 2011, we noticed that a lot of games like Monday Night Combat were starting to pull towards what would soon be called esports. We knew that our game would be perfect for this - but we had neither a publisher nor an adequate budget.

We assumed that the second game would be of high quality, more realistic. We wasted many hours of conceptualization and scaling. We tried to come up with realistic car stadiums that were realistic in size. Then we changed too much, moved away from the original concept, but we never managed to create a normal interesting prototype, and in Psyonix it is almost a death sentence. We didn't have much fun working on the game. We changed cars, changed the physics model, changed something else and just got confused.

We tried to find a publisher, but nobody accepted the game and I can't blame them for that. Now I understand that the game was trying to get ahead of its time. In 2011, esports was just starting to develop.

So we did what all the developers were doing back then - we started creating an open world game. Our lead technical artist, a true wizard, was able to do this, and we decided to take advantage of it. We assumed that the player would be able to do a lot of different things. He, of course, could go to the stadium to play football, but that was one of the options. It's a good idea, but perhaps too big for our small studio. There were only 15 of us. We started to come up with different races and mini-games.

The game grew and expanded, we could no longer stop it. We had to pay attention to every piece of the game, and as a result, nothing came out of high quality. And physics, which was perfect for playing football, was not very suitable for other activities. We made it specifically for jumping and flying around the arena - when with the same physics the car started jumping over the hills, nothing good came of it.

Rocket league

As a result, we finally came to the development of the Rocket League. True, at that time it was called differently. We decided that we wanted to make a game that was supposed to be SARBPC. Yes, this is the official abbreviation. Possibly the worst acronym of all time. We created a small team that could work without distracting the entire studio at once.

We gave up any crazy ideas - we just wanted to finalize the main idea. It should have turned out to be a soccer game on cars that would be played on dedicated servers. We had to create alpha prototypes as soon as possible. And we were going to make a free-to-play game. The year was 2013, Team Fortress 2 and Dota2 thundered with incredible success, no one screwed up yet by making a free game on PC. We thought that if we just create a free-to-play game, money would flow to our office.

What changed

We are often asked: “You did almost the same game, but got a completely different result. So what exactly is the difference? "

Firstly, this time the games are running on dedicated servers - this is a very big change. But in 2008 we couldn't afford it. Signal latency between players was a big problem. From the very beginning, we needed dedicated servers for the Rocket League.

Secondly, we almost got to 60 frames per second, even on the PlayStation 4. For a game where every fraction of a second matters, a high refresh rate is a must. The first game on the PlayStation 3 had such a low frame rate that it felt "wooden", much worse than the version we played on the PC.

Third, the match selection system has been greatly improved. I will not go into details, I will just say that we have made a very flexible rating system, which is based on the uncertainty of the player's skill level.

We also expanded the possibilities for customizing cars. This is very important for any sport.

And, of course, we spent two years fine-tuning all the ideas and mechanics. Nothing groundbreaking here, but when discussing development, people often forget how important it is. Not everyone can afford to spend two years on meticulous improvements, but we could. The contract work brought in enough money for the company to work safely on the Rocket League.

At this stage, our outsourcing studio experience played a big role. We saw how other companies work and understood what to do and what not to do. We have seen more than once how development teams get tired of endless stand-ups and meetings.

We perfected our knowledge of the Unreal 3 engine. It seems we knew everything about it: all the stupid things that it sometimes throws out, all the dark magic on which it worked. We have honed our own development process. Before Rocket League, we made an ARC Squadron game for iOS. We put a lot of effort into it, and critics praised the game, but it didn't sell well.

At GDC, many talk about their successes, but few mention failures. We started and abandoned a huge number of projects. There were a lot of them, but that's perfectly normal. Game development is tricky. We all make mistakes, but if you can learn from those mistakes, then you're fine.

Two problems were particularly acute. Firstly, while the development team was growing, we often lost control of the situation: everyone had their own opinion, their own wishes, which were difficult to satisfy.

Secondly, due to the large size of the team, we often could not decide what exactly we were building. But in the case of the Rocket League, we knew where we were going from the very beginning. Therefore, everyone clearly understood what to do at each specific moment at each stage of development.

Key Decisions

Our game is pretty simple. Coming into the game, many ask the question: why do cars have no characteristics? "I want a car that is more suitable for standing at the gate." But we did not have characteristics in the first game either, we are fundamentally opposed to such an approach. At the same time, Rocket League is a very dynamic game. In three seconds, the player can leave the goalkeeper's position and attack the enemy gate. Separating cars by characteristics would have been a nuisance to the concept; we felt it would be wrong.

Discarding characteristics was not an obvious decision for us. We were worried about this because in the reviews for the first game we wrote that it lacks depth. As a result, we simply did not have time to test a version of the game in which different cars have different characteristics. That is, our "brilliant" solution was born out of a lack of time.

Second, we were concerned that users would not be impressed by a single game mode. Doing just the football mode was dangerous. But we, again, did not have enough time to work out other modes. We had been working on the football mode for over seven years by the time the game was released. Later, we released additional modes as special events, and everything worked out well, but at the time of development it was not at all obvious to us how best to proceed.

Thirdly, we argued for a long time in the studio, but settled on the fact that there will be only one type of stadium in the game. There were different stadiums in SARPBC, up to bagels, through which you had to drive the ball towards the opponent's goal. After polling the players, we realized that most of them prefer to play on the Urban map, which became the basis for the playing field in the Rocket League. We decided not to waste energy and resources on creating different maps, if players still prefer our version of de_dust.

This solution gave several advantages: we again managed to concentrate forces on one thing and worked every meter of the field. We spent a lot of time working on the map - with multiple maps, we would not have achieved this quality. Some "veterans" of the series did not like it, they did not understand why the second version of the game had less content than the first. We had to come to terms with this.