BB_dev

Introducing The Van Game (coming to iOS/Android and PC/Mac), in which you live in a van with friends and travel around the USA visiting National Parks. It’s all about managing resources, navigating through random events, and exploring beautiful landscapes. You have (at most) a team of five characters who interact and give their opinions on events and the journey’s success. The game is heavily inspired by the 1985 Oregon Trail, as well as the more recent Organ Trail, and a little splash of Kind of Dragon Pass.

Please note that the UI is in progress and none of it is final.

Hi all, my name is Bruce! I’ve been working on “The Van Game” for about a year now. I’ve made a few smaller mobile games but this is my first Real Game™. I’ve done all of the programming/design but I’m… not good at art. Luckily I’ve gathered together an excellent group of freelancers to help with the project. All of the 2D art including backgrounds are by a great guy named Vicente Nitte and all of the 3D assets are by an equally great person who’s real name I don’t actually know but they go by LimitIV. Music is styled on lofi beats and I’m really pleased with how they turned out, all by Johnathan Orsi (great guy!) You can listen to the music here. Fun fact; Vicente is originally from Venezuela but lives in Chile, LimitIV is in the UK, Johnathan Orsi is in Canada, and I live in North Carolina, USA. We’re from all over the place!

The original idea of the game was for it to be about train hopping around the US. I had some good friends in college who had done it and the stories they told made it seem like a lot of fun. I had a basic prototype working but didn’t like the restriction that came with the railroads, of only having certain routes at certain times. Then a friend told me about how she wanted to sell all of her stuff, buy a van and live the nomad life. I thought it sounded scary in real life but it would make a great game. But wandering aimlessly wouldn’t be as much fun as having at least an idea of where to go. That’s when I decided to add in the National Parks for the players to travel to. This also allows me to put in educational facts about the parks which really jives with general approval of learning/teaching.

I see this game as a loose sequel to the 1985 Oregon Trail. Maybe not a direct sequel but certainly inspired by it. In fact, the designer of the 1985 version (not the previous versions which were mostly text-based) has a TON of really awesome write-ups discussing his design decisions. Click here for his website and here for a great medium article about redesigning the whole game from being text based.

I think it was Sid Meier who once gave a rough guide to making a sequel. I can’t find the exact quote but it was something like “To make a sequel you keep 33%, improve and expand on 33% from the original, and for the last 33% you make stuff that's entirely new.” For me the extra 1% is hiring really good artists.

The original 33% is the basics of Oregon Trail. You manage your resources, you travel along with the classic Oregon Trail style travel screen, you encounter random events, everyone gets dysentery and you start over until you win. The next 33% was improving and expanding on the original - which was difficult since the original is already so good. As my background is mobile games, I thought I could do more with mini-games, like Oregon Trail’s classic hunting mini-game. I didn’t want to put a giant rail gun on the van (honestly, the artists said no), so I decided instead to take successful hyper-casual mobile games and put vans in them. My personal favorite is one I call “Draw Wheels”, based on a whole genre of mobile games where you simply draw the wheels on your vehicle and try to win a race. Look at them go!

Continuing to expand and improve old concepts, I decided to mess with the map. In the original Oregon Trail the map is just something to check to see how far until your next stop, and you only get to choose a route in a couple spots and they end up in the same place anyway. It was clear that for this game it would need to allow the players to move towards whatever destination they wanted to. The map shows the entire continental US and has 14 National Parks to visit and quite a few cities and towns to stop in along the way to replenish supplies. A tangle of roads connect all these destinations and players are free to get lost going whichever way they like (although there is a GPS feature).
Here is just a snippet of the map, I’m planning a dev log on the map.

The last 33% needed was to introduce something that’s entirely new. In Oregon Trail, the characters are one-dimensional. You name them after your friends, they drop dead, and that’s about it. I decided very early on that the characters should have full portraits (generated through a program called pixel-me (https://store.steampowered.com/app/875460/PixelMe/)). Also, the characters should have an opinion about what's going on in the game. If you’re running low on food - they will complain. If things are going well - they will be excited. They tell you what park they’d like to go to next, and they have opinions about the parks when they get there. And yes, you can still name them after your friends or people you hate and YES they can still catch dysentery. I guess this is sort of an improvement technically but I count it as new.

Also new is the ability to customize your "wagon" aka your van. In Oregon Trail you have your wagon and oxen, but they cannot be changed or updated. A big aspect of the #VanLife movement is customizing your van. I had actually prototyped a whole interior customization aspect but it felt like a waste since most of the action happens outside of the van. LimitIV did an excellent job on the vans. Players can choose from dozens of combinations of colors and decals, there’s really quite a lot.

I’ll be posting more updates here as work continues. Let me know what you think of the project so far! Also I’m looking for a publisher and I’m available for work. Thank you for reading!