NASCAR 2005: Chase for the Cup Designer Diary #1

With NASCAR Thunder, Electronic Arts has long provided NASCAR fans with games that simulate their favorite sport. This year, the series has undergone a name change--now it's called NASCAR 2005: Chase for the Cup--and it's getting a substantial gameplay overhaul as well. In our first designer diary, designers Mike DeVault, Matt Lewis, and Sean Wilson will fill us in on one of the new modes you'll find in this new NASCAR game.

The Evolution of Fight to the Top Mode

Chase for the Cup will bring a load of new features to the long-lived series.

The design process on the NASCAR 2005: Chase for the Cup project was a collaborative effort involving a small group of highly motivated and dedicated people here at the Tiburon Studios in Orlando. Once the design was put in place, our development and art teams worked tirelessly to pull it all together. We're all avid NASCAR fans and our main goal was to create a game mode that would reflect our passion for racing as well as introduce new fans to the game and the sport.

In this diary we're going to discuss the creation and design process surrounding our latest and greatest feature, "Fight to the Top" mode. Fight to the Top came from the desire to create a mode that genuinely reflects the real-life climb drivers make to get to the NEXTEL Cup series. The end result was a feature that allows players to start a racing career as an aspiring driver with hopes of making it big in the world of NASCAR. The fight to the sport's premier series won't be without a challenge, however, as players will have to rise through the ranks of three other racing circuits before landing in the big time. Proving yourself worthy to be NASCAR's next big thing won't be easy though. Besides finishing well in your races, you'll have to manage your driver's prestige, fan support, as well as your on-track reputation. Once you've put all the pieces in place, you'll start carving your niche in the sport on the way to superstardom.

In previous years, our game experience was limited to merely driving in NEXTEL Cup series races. One of our first problems was that we needed to expand upon the depth of racing in the game. So to that end, we knew that NASCAR was more than just stock car racing. There were several more racing series sanctioned by NASCAR that we hadn't yet tapped into. So we came up with the idea of adding other NASCAR racing series to our existing career mode. We settled on the addition of 3 new series, NASCAR Featherlite Modifieds, NASCAR Craftsman Trucks, and NASCAR Busch series cars.

As we started to brainstorm ideas on how to implement these new cars to the game, we came to the conclusion that these additional racing series wouldn't fit into the existing scope of our current career mode. So we decided to start from scratch on a similar feature that would be more engaging and dynamic. This was when Fight to the Top was first conceived.

Over the years, we have spent a great deal of time talking to drivers, such as: Elliott Sadler, Ryan Newman, Bobby Labonte, and others. Often we would just talk to them about how they became involved in racing. Each driver usually started off in some small series in some small town and they literally had to fight for their spot in the Nextel series. This feedback we got from the drivers helped us to build a foundation for a story that would eventually become Fight to the Top mode.

Climb your way up the ladder through any means necessary in the Fight to the Top mode.

We now had a goal for this new mode, to take a player of limited means and stature through four racing series into the NEXTEL Cup series with the main goal of winning the NEXTEL Cup. Our next challenge was now to develop a plan on how to bring it all together. We decided to flush out all the other elements that a game mode like Fight to the Top needed to make it feel realistic. These were the day-to-day experiences that a driver faces every day in a racing career that we wanted to incorporate into the game. So we began brainstorming and creating designs for things such as fan support, autograph signing, driver prestige, merchandising, hero/villain status, and relationships with other drivers. All of these features were important in telling the story of a driver fighting his way to the top, but the ultimate challenge was to find a way to make them all work cohesively throughout four different racing series.

Our next goal was to create a progression through Fight to the Top that would give the player choices. We wanted the player to have more options on where, when, and what he could race and what he had to manage. This was important to us because not everybody likes to do the same things when playing a game, so we decided to create a more customizable experience for Fight to the Top. Through the game's progression, we wanted to control how a player jumped to a new series and how fast these jumps would occur. We didn't want him to languish in one series for too long, but at the same time we didn't want him to shoot straight to the NEXTEL Cup series too quickly. That's when we decided to add a role-playing game element to Fight to the Top mode. We created a driver prestige rating system that controlled how quickly the driver would move through the ranks. Prestige would be the main attribute of the player's driver and it would be earned by finishing well in race events. This put the player in charge of how fast his driver would progress through Fight to the Top.