Postmortem: Sniper Studios' Crazy Taxi Fare Wars

Author: by Staff

In this Gamasutra-exclusive postmortem, Jeff Hasson of Redwood City-based Sniper Studios discusses the developer's experience in creating Crazy Taxi Fare Wars, a PSP version of Sega's arcade and console game series, with fascinating technical detail on the game's creation. In creating Crazy Taxi Fare Wars Hasson's team settled on two key elements: settled on two key elements: bringing over a true port of both Crazy Taxi and Crazy Taxi 2 and adding multiplayer game modes. Like any project, though, the process wasn't exactly as planned. Fortunately, many things went right in the design department, as he explains: "We all agreed that doing a direct port would not be enough to even satisfy the most hardcore Crazy Taxi fan. Throwing in Crazy Taxi 2 definitely made it seem better but still not taking advantage of the new platform. Adding a single player campaign was very intriguing but it would have taken even more time and money to develop balance and tune. Multiplayer seemed like a big challenge but worth it for the player. The final piece of the puzzle was the custom music player so that fans could bring in all of their favorite songs." However, Hasson says, the multiplayer would prove challenging: "The first topic to mention is the multiplayer modes of the game and specifically the Head to Head mode. We took the original Dreamcast source code from Sega of Japan and used it as our basis for porting. From a design standpoint, multiplayer was the next logical step in the evolution of the franchise, but re-engineering the original code to support two independently controlled cabs in the same space, on the same map, at the same time, proved to be a difficult challenge. The original source code layout for the collisions and physics of the cars was spread out into several areas, making the task even more technically challenging. Our engineers were perplexed by this layout and knew that it would take too long to try and completely track down all of the effects that a single change might make to either part of the code." You can now read the full feature, with more candid discussion of what went right and what went wrong in Crazy Taxi Fare Wars development cycle (no reg. required, please feel free to link to this feature from other websites).