EverywherE - Open Beta

Overview

The Everywhere Open Beta, held in 2024, invited the public into the game to create their own experiences, from deathmatches and races to environments and personally curated game modes. I worked on the race game mode, and these were the first of our races to be shown to the public. At this stage we were building Arcadia itself, and the race nodes were among the first tools made for it.

The vehicles were arcade-style, with a futuristic, utopia-punk feel and mostly cosmetic upgrades, of which the first tier was available for free in the beta. Every race level was built in the builder's UGC editor letting their own creativity be the only limit on what could be built.

My Role

• Led a cross-discipline team of 20 across code, design, art and audio to develop the racing game modes, owning balancing, race variations and track design.

What I Built

Built visual scripting tools that let players create content with no knowledge of programming.

• Wrote the full set of Lua scripts that the races were originally based on.
• Worked with a colleague over six months to turn those scripts into a suite of scripting nodes with customisable inputs, outputs and connections. The nodes detect when a player passes a gate, track each player's position in the race, and supply the base race UI, keeping the time, current gate and position up to date.
• When making scripting tools for players, you have to decide how granular to make them. The more granular the tool, the more options builders have, but the more complex it becomes. We wanted players to be able to make something quickly, so we put the majority of the logic into a single management node.
• From that one node, a builder chooses between a looped or point-to-point race and other settings/options. Gates are placed as separate nodes, as many as the builder wants, and linked together in the order they should be driven.

Result

We gave builders a race template to start from, and the level design they wrapped around it was really exciting to see. Players made some great tracks, from Gothic and spooky settings that went back in time to futuristic races.

Lessons

The races were in a transition from script to logic nodes at the time, so some things were a little rushed and the tools did not have the full functionality we wanted to give players. Coming back to it for the MindsEye Multiplayer Races, we were able to improve the template considerably, making it cleaner, easier to use and far more capable. That is why six races could be built and launched in four months.