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[rocket5tim]

We just wrapped an 18th month project so now I'm gonna do something a LOT smaller and totally different and what the hell let's make a racing game with cars and explosions and burnouts and blog about it here.

Goals:
- keep it simple.
- make it as fun (funner!) than the top 100 racing games.

Here's the basic car controller flailing around on a basic track.


Next steps:
- skid marks
- randomized track (endless runner style)
- checkpoints
- boosts and slowy things
- gates (scoring triggers)
- obstacles?
- controller tuning
- explosions
- find the fun (!)

[MerlijnVH]

Off to a great start! Camera and car have a good feeling to them. Adding a quad under the car with a little blob shadow could help give it more depth, too.

[GalaethGames]

subscribed, already looks lovely!

[rocket5tim]

Off to a great start! Camera and car have a good feeling to them. Adding a quad under the car with a little blob shadow could help give it more depth, too.

Thanks, good point about the shadow... gonna add that to the list.

Here's a first pass at skid marks using Unity's trail renderer. It's a decent proof of concept, but the results aren't great because the trail renderer always faces the camera so it ends up clipping into the ground at certain angles. Also it's on all the time, ideally it should only be on when the tires are skidding. Next I'm gonna try generating a mesh at runtime so I can have more control over it.

[matriax]

The skid marks looks cool!

Will be great if you can do something like SPeed Demos:

[rocket5tim]

@matriax something like Speed Demons would be fun but that goes against my keep it simple approach to this project - my car doesn't currently have suspension so I can't do any realistic looking jumps. Something to think about tho if I want to redo the car with suspension (I have to admit I'm tempted, I love jumps!).

Here's another pass at the skid marks, this time using meshes so I have more control over how/when they're created and destroyed. The code is based on this guys skid script, but I converted it to C# and removed some stuff I didn't need.



On a side note, can anyone recommend a good gif screen capture app for Mac? I'm using LICEcap but was wondering if there's something better out there (google hasn't helped much).

[hube]

This is looking so rad. Subscribed.

[rocket5tim]

This is looking so rad. Subscribed.

Thanks!

I spent some time fine tuning the car controller using a track layout from the Super Sprint arcade game as a baseline for how I want the car to behave. The controller still needs some tweaking but it's getting closer. Next step is to build out a real track and work on the camera.

[Superb Joe]

have you played the isometric arcade racers of the 90s? neo drift out, overtop, the great 1000 mile rally, etc? if you have, do everything different to those because they fucking sucked

[rocket5tim]

have you played the isometric arcade racers of the 90s? neo drift out, overtop, the great 1000 mile rally, etc? if you have, do everything different to those because they fucking sucked

heh, point taken. The camera in that last gif was just to help me tune and test out the car controller, I'm not trying to mimic those old isometric games at all.

Here's the latest iteration with a brand new camera that attempts to look ahead and also keeps the car on either the left or right side of the screen depending on which direction it's facing. Plus an early look at a low-poly polygonal art style I'm trying out.



Top down view showing a very short section of the track

[AegarPyke]

That's amazing. The art style is super and I wouldn't change a thing (except maybe a slightly higher poly car).

[FlukeXP]

Nice.  Clean, simple iso racing.  Very cool.

[rocket5tim]

That's amazing. The art style is super and I wouldn't change a thing (except maybe a slightly higher poly car).

lol yeah the car is super placeholder. 

[Green Gospod]

Sweet.

Weapons. Destruction. Physics. Wreckage.
Add many explosions and destructible obstacles.
Add simple weapons. Like throwing a bomb. Or a disc that cuts off a tire. (you can still drive, but drift all the time)
Improve terrain a bit as I'm sure you're planning to, but don't add more than a few polygons.
But all of this havoc in a simplistic low poly style.  

lol yeah the car is super placeholder.  

He laughed because he probably threw this together in an hour as placeholder art.  

[GalaethGames]

It looks awesome.

I think the low poly works well, and can imagine it will work with the cars too.

Will you have different car types?