Overview

Contributions: Social Multiplayer Systems, Seasonal Content Design, Tools

Meetups is a multiplayer feature that allows players to join an open lobby on-track with a number of other players. Players are free to utilize whatever car they want and can vote to change tracks at any time. There are two core Meetup types - Drift Meetups, in which Drift scoring is enabled, and Track Day Meetups in which normal laptime scoring is in effect.

Design Goals

• On-Track Social Mode - Provide Players with a social on-track game mode, free of the pressures of competition

• Meetup Variety - Build Meetup events that support a variety of gameplay styles (drift, drag, track day, etc.)

• Player Control - Support Track Voting, giving players some control over which tracks to spend time on

• Content Showcase - Utilize Dynamic Weather / Time of Day to bring Meetups to life and provide additional on-track variety and beauty

Systems Design / Gameplay Design

As the sole Designer for the Meetups feature, it was not only my responsibility to document the feature, but also to design and build the individual Meetups / track playlists themselves, determining what Meetup themes players would find most interesting and engaging.

Track Voting

Track Voting enables players to vote for 1 of 3 possible track options when in a ‘Cycled Track’ Meetup. Once a track reached at least 50% of the lobby vote, the lobby would automatically end the current session and start loading to the top voted track. This feature puts players in control of the Meetup experience and allows them to go to a track of their choosing.

Dynamic Time of Day / Weather

Dynamic Time of Day and Weather on every track is a key feature that was highlighted during the launch of Forza Motorsport. Meetups was a great opportunity to lean into this feature, and use our time of day time scaling to enable players to experience a full 24 hour time of day experience, with dynamic weather changes, in a shorter period of time that aligned with average player session length.

Player Collisions

Handling player collisions in Meetups was an interesting problem for us to solve. In Meetups, which is generally more of a social experience, many players enjoy the physicality of driving around and viewing other players’ cars, however player griefing is a real issue to overcome. We polled our community and shipped Meetups with collisions enabled, with controls to adjust collisions on-the-fly, via a server side configuration change. After a period of time, we heard from our community and disabled collisions in certain types of events (Track Day Meetups) and in certain scenarios (driving backwards on the track, high speed differential, etc).