I am working on a game where players will drive around in a car as either a cop or criminal. I want to have no guns, or shooting mechanics, so its more kid friendly, but sort of capture the chase mechanics of games like GTA.
I am wondering what to do about pedestrians, and whether or not to include the ability to run over pedestrians and hurt people? Is that ok to do on mobile and not get a rating that it is too violent?
What might you guys do? Use robots instead of human pedestrians or something silly like that? Just include pedestrians who run away from all collisions and can’t be hurt similar to some games? Include ragdoll hitting of pedestrians because its fun, but show no blood or anything?
Well its not really targeting kids specifically, but I don’t want to make it too violent so they can play as well.
So I guess more specifically what I want to know is, how do I make that ok for kids? Robotic/Non-human pedestrians? Empty sidewalks? Pedestrians dodge the cars no matter what?
The Lego games have dodging pedestrians, granted, the whole game is toy style. But the dodging is actually pretty funny, they quickly get out of the way most of the time, but if you are going faster or really close they do a jump dive and yell at you.
The lego games did seem to handle that stuff pretty well, with the characters staying out of harms way. I wonder if I could find middle ground between full GTA style ragdoll action, and that friendly funny escape of the lego characters… somehow? Hmm…
Unless the player is sticking around long enough to see them get up (not likely if “chase sequences from GTA” are being emulated), wouldn’t the player’s perception be all but the same as them hitting the pedestrians and the pedestrians being knocked down permanently?
The line of what it’s safe to do and what is not is always moving. People are becoming offended by everything, in a few years they will get offended by their own existence.
Maybe they could be knocked to a sitting position with cartoon birds comically tweeting around their head to show they are just stunned. You could still get to hear the tweeting birds whilst driving past them at speed.
I love the TT lego games. One of my favorite things about them (particularly the movie based ones) is that often have to make things less violent and generally kid friendly. Obviously because they are toys to begin with, there is built in solutions, like when people “die” they just break apart. They are often usually still seen talking later (sometimes just the head). My favorite is the Jurassic World game. The raptors kill a lot of people in the movie. In the lego game however, they steal people’s hats. It’s silly and pretty funny. It’s neat way to keep the actual gameplay there, but have fun with it and be basically non-violent.
To me, the ironic thing about stopping cars from hitting people is that it has a negative impact of its own.
If a kid is upset by the fact that running into people while doing dangerous, irresponsible stuff in a car causes harm then at least that sends some message about the consequences. On the flip side, by removing the ability for such behaviour to cause harm you’re reinforcing that behaviour as being cool while distancing it from its consequences. It makes something out to be harmless when it is not.
I realise that in this case you’re not trying to send a message one way or another, and I don’t think you have to. I’m commenting on the rules around this stuff more than the game design. It’s a case where rules about being “kid friendly” potentially have downsides of their own if you take the obvious solutions.
I also like the Lego approach with broken toys because while it takes the edge off the seriousness of the harm that is caused it doesn’t actually dodge the issue at all.
The consequences of striking people could further be conveyed by things like reducing score, temporarily slowing the vehicle decreasing odds of advancing in the game or having a “3 strikes and you’re out” rule.
So it may be a measure of the game as a whole that dictates whether the violence is appropriately handled or not, rather than on just a single animation.
