So if you notice a familiar stride while playing the game, Craven wants to hear from you (the game has its own Discord server here or you can reach out to Craven on Twitter). The main character controlled by the player is based on footage of a runner from Eastern Michigan University’s Running Science Laboratory, but Craven says he doesn’t know the runner’s exact identity. From there, he’d add his own tweaks before assigning each runner’s form to a different character. “You have to convey personality with these different runners that 90% of the time you’re seeing from the back.”Ĭraven started with character models based on Little Mac, the main character from the 1987 NES boxing game Punch-Out!!, then asked a few friends to record themselves running on treadmills and used an animation technique known as rotoscoping to trace over the footage and translate it to an animation. “That was a big challenge, in my mind,” Craven says. He also took great care to give each character their own distinct running style. Craven is hoping the final version of the game, which is still under construction, will have four courses (course #2 will be a golf course). He was the 2005 Illinois 2A runner-up (in a finish that spawned a famous photo), finished third at Foot Locker nationals that year, and went on to run at the University of Wisconsin - Craven says one of his claims to fame is going undefeated in cross country against Evan Jager, whom he beat at states, FL Midwest, and FL nationals.Ĭurerently, the demo version has one course, a classic high school layout that passes by school buses and Porta Potties and includes a wooded section and a section on the track. The game will feel familiar to anyone who ran cross country - which Craven did, to great success. That’s the kind of vibe he was going with for XC: Cross Country Racing, and the simple gameplay and campy animation feel as though they belong on the NES or a mid-’90s computer game (ultimately, Craven says, he sees it as a mobile/VR game). Each opposing racer changes their speed 24 times during the course of the race it’s up to the player to determine which moves to follow and when to come over top with a move of their own.Ĭraven doesn’t consider himself a big gamer, but has always enjoyed retro video games one of his Christmas traditions is playing Tecmo Super Bowl against his brother every year. “I wanted it to be like you’re getting spiked, you’re following too closely and that’s your punishment for it,” Craven says.Īnd, just like a real race, there is strategy. Run too close and the player’s character is spun off course, losing precious time. Running in another athlete’s slipstream enables the player to preserve their stamina bar. But there are no green or red shells in cross country. Craven felt there needed to be an element of challenge to prevent the game from being too easy. But he also wanted the game to be grounded in reality, which created a problem. The game, titled XC: Cross Country Racing, is modeled after racing games such as Mario Kart and Crash Bandicoot, with the player alternately tapping the “g” and “h” keys to run and using “f” and “j” to turn. A free demo version is now available for download for Mac, Windows, or Linux. He spent over 50 hours a week working on the project over the summer, creating every element of the game himself, from animation to coding to soundtrack. Once COVID hit, he moved back home to Indiana and redoubled his efforts. “There were all these really cool softwares that were available that you could make the kind of things that you played as a kid that used to have to buy $200,000 pieces of equipment to make and now you can do it practically in your desktop browser,” Craven says.Ĭraven learned how to code and, prior to the pandemic, had begun developing the game part-time while driving for Uber in Austin, Tex. And though Craven had no experience designing a video game, he realized it might be possible with some effort. Later, he became interested in 3D design. “A nytime I’m looking to make something, I’m always putting it through the lens of running and trying to tell running stories in different ways,” Craven says. A creative sort, Craven released a running-themed music album in 2013 with song titles like “Fartlek” and “Ballad of the Injured Runner.” That’s the challenge Craven, 32, set himself.
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