Overview

Role(s): Seasonal Content Design, Tools Design

Rivals are solo ‘hot-lapping’ Events, where players compete in order to earn the top spot on the leaderboard. In a Rivals event, players race asynchronously against ‘ghosts’ (recordings of each player’s best completed lap time), which acts as a visual representation of the lap time the Player needs to beat in order climb the leaderboard. This visualization allows Players to see moment-to-moment how they are doing in comparison to the next best Player on the leaderboard (or Player of their choice).

Design Goals

• Help Players understand how/where they can improve their own laptimes / drift scores via competitive leaderboards

• Provide Players with a variety of time trial categories, challenging players to climb the leaderboards in an area of competition that they enjoy

• Encourage players to engage with other in-game systems, such as car building or competitive multiplayer racing through the usage of ‘Spec’ tuning, as well as ‘Open Division’ events

Seasonal Content Authoring

Similar to our other game modes, my role for Rivals events consisted largely of planning, designing, and building each individual Rivals Event that we shipped as part of our live program.

Rivals was one of the lightest touch game modes we had in each of our updates, as it largely just entailed picking a great car & track combination, configuring weather and time of day, and the rest was largely templatized in a way that required minimal design effort each month.

Expanded Rivals Categories

I was directly responsible in the growth and expansion of the Rivals game mode with the addition of Spec Division Rivals and Open Division Rivals, both of which combined nearly doubled the amount of Rivals events active at any given time, giving our players lots of Rivals content to enjoy and greatly expanding the engagement of the overall feature.

Partnership Team Collaboration

We had an internal partnership team that worked with external partners (i.e Logitech, Mobil 1, Red Bull, etc.) to build Rivals events, and I played a key role in reviewing the work done by the partnership team to ensure feasibility of any requests design quality of the content.