Trials Garage Update #1: UGC
Trials riders, start your engines it’s time for the first Trials Garage Update. As we discussed last week, an important aspect of our plans for the future of the Trials brand involves expanding on the close relationship we have with our players that has been a big factor in the success of the Trials series. Each month we will discuss a different topic about Trials in order to gain more insights on our players feelings and better understand their preferences. This month’s topic? User Generated Content (UGC).
Each month, in addition to this Trials Garage Update article we will also have a new edition of our Trials Garage Radio podcast where we go a bit more in depth on our topic with the people behind the scenes. This month’s Trials Radio podcast can be found on our Soundcloud profile as well as linked a bit later in this article.
The final element of our monthly updates is a survey. These surveys will help us gather more information on what you think about our topic. This month’s survey asks questions about playing, creating and sharing UGC.
We <3 Community Creators
Custom tracks have been a huge part of Trials for a long time now. The immensely creative community of builders is inspiring and the incredible amount of talent out there is undeniable. We’ve been very impressed with a lot of the work we’ve seen and as a result we have hired a number of builders from the community to work with our level team.
Hiring talent from the community is nothing new for Trials & RedLynx. Ever since Trials HD when community builders like KatamariUK & CannibalShogun were brought on to work on DLCs, the majority of our level design teams have been builders who started out creating custom tracks in one of our games. Some older community hires like DJ2witchy, mutetus, DragonMICKY, KALzzone, Loot Monkey & murderbysound remain in the mix but of course that’s just scratching the surface. If you are a fan of custom tracks these new names are ones you are sure to know; Kailiman, ObsceneFreak, Tekila, Rishaanvb, Monstified, Coupain Gotier, FG-312 & the always impressive PneumaticBog484 are all working with our level team.
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How we choose who to work with is not as simple as identifying who makes the best tracks on Track Central. We start with a list of top notch builders from the community who are then contacted about the opportunity. Next we give these candidates test assignments. There are two primary things we look at with these assignments. First is the ability to build great tracks based on the directions we provide. The other is the ability to work with our team. Level designers need to be able to take feedback on their work and apply that feedback to improve their tracks.
These test assignments are done in Trials Fusion so this month we’ve got a special treat, a collection of really great custom tracks in Fusion you can play right now. Try them out for yourself in the Community Recommended feed.
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This month we sat down with two community members who have made the transition to the RedLynx Level Design team. RishaanVB & ObsceneFreak will share some of their experiences moving from community to RedLynx builders on our first Trials Radio podcast. We also talk with Producer Mickaël Godard (also known as En0) to give us some insights on the development process.
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Track Central
Introduced in Trials Evolution, Track Central is the hub of custom track sharing in Trials and an industry leader when it comes to in-game UGC distribution. While we do consider TC to be among the best custom content platforms in gaming it doesn’t mean we don’t see room for improvement. In fact continuing to improve TC is very important to us.
We’ve seen from previous games that around half of our players never play any custom tracks. With so much amazing content available on TC this is something we’d like to improve. Our primary goal with TC is to make it more accessible for all players. In plain terms this means we want to make it as easy as possible for players to find great content that fits their play style. We have many ideas for ways to achieve this including streamlining the feed system, finding better ways to display content & creating some meta game around UGC creation and usage.
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One thing that can help us focus our plans is good feedback from awesome people like you. We already have a lot of great suggestions for TC and the editor on our forums but one thing we always have to do when looking at new features or improvements is prioritization. We can’t do everything we’d like to. In order to ensure that we focus on features that will have the biggest impact for the most players we need to get feedback on all aspects of UGC from as many players as possible. This month’s Trials Garage Survey is all about creating, sharing & consuming UGC in Trials. Please be sure to complete this survey to have your opinions heard.
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Track Editor
The track editor is a complex beast. Those of you who use it know its power and complexity. This is a key element of the success of Trials brand. It enables our own team to build amazing levels and it enables our players to feed Track Central with insane creations. So it is highly important for us to keep improving our main tool. We have a lot of improvements we are looking at but there is one highly requested feature from the building community that we are specifically looking at for now: implementing Scalable objects!
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Another request we hear from members of the building community who like to collaborate on tracks is the ability to use the editor with multiple users over a network. We have talked about this type of feature a lot, unfortunately implementing some type of multiplayer in the editor is an extremely large and complex task. There are many features in a Trials game that require a lot of time from our online coders & engineers so another huge feature like this is outside the scope of a Trials project (for more about how we set priorities and why we can’t do every great idea check out our interview with Mickael Godard on this month’s Trials Radio podcast). We do recognize that some builders like to work in teams. While we don’t have any solutions to share right now it is something we are thinking about when we discuss potential improvements to the editor and track sharing.
Another very important aspect of the editor is objects. Probably every track builder has that one object they really wish they could use in their tracks and we want to know what they are. In this month’s Trials garage survey there is a question about your most wanted object in the editor. Obviously we can’t create every object our players suggest but we might be able to include some of them in a future iteration of the Trials editor. Be sure to take this month’s survey to share your views on UGC in Trials and let us know what object you’d like to see in the editor.
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That about does it for this month, riders. Tune in next month when we’ll introduce a new topic for discussion and share some insights from this month’s survey and discussions.