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Mechanics Overview

With the ability to seamlessly move from ground to air each scenario presents unique challenges for the player. The core philosophy is to give the player as much control as possible and compensate with that in the level design by making it as challenging and punishing as possible to make the player fully utilize their freedom. This is inspired by the way Ultrakill differs from normal FPS games and how it gives the player maximum control and allows the player to be the only limiter of how they accomplish a level. The extra challenge leads the player to a more rewarding sense of accomplishment upon completing the more difficult and challenging level. This means that if there was an easier way to implement a functionality but it removed player agency without introducing a unique challenge then it was immediately disregarded as it went against the core spirit of the game. This worked as a challenge to myself during the development, as it let me develop and use systems that I had not used before, which proved to be a great learning opportunity.

Driving

The driving mechanics were an extreme challenge for me and allowed me to become much more familiar with vector math and Unity’s physics system. The driving is made up of several individual pieces of logic that all work together to give a smooth driving experience. The main physics loop of the driving controls goes in order of updating itself on the normals of what surface it is on. It then uses that information to update the vehicles offset off the ground, its rotation to align with the ground, and finally the velocity based on a mixture of player input and physics.

Flying

Flying was even more of a challenge for me, although the crux of the problems came this time, in the form of game design. This stemmed from the core creed of the project being player freedom. I wanted to allow the player to exit any ramp from any angle, and for the player to be able to have full pivot, yaw and roll controls. This initially brought a host of issues such as players being able to simply bypass the track by flying over it and simply making it impossible to design a track. This system primarily worked by rotating the vehicle first, then transforming the velocity vector by the rotation, which allowed the player to essentially rotate their way out of gravity, which just didn’t feel good, and was impossible to design around and was much harder to add outside force modifiers too.

My solution came in the form of Mario Kart 8 and its gliding system. I decided to limit the player a little bit by applying a slight drag and gravity effect that would cause the player to slowly lose velocity and fall downwards over time as they stayed in the air. Secondly, to fix the problem of being able to turn out of gravity too easily, I changed the process so that the vehicle's rotation was changed to face the velocity, and the player input added force to the current velocity in the direction they input, rather than directly controlling the vehicle's rotation. I also removed their ability to manually boost when in the air. This felt much more natural as a player and allowed me to actually design levels that would challenge a player, while still giving them immense freedom in their control.

As for maintaining speed on airborne parts of the track, I either have another track which they can land on in time to maintain speed, or I use AirBoost rings. AirBoost rings are rings floating in the air which give the player a boost of speed when they fly through them. Continually flying through them allows the player to maintain speed in the air and allows for new exciting and creative level design opportunities for me to design and develop.

Game Loop and Challenges

With the core control mechanics complete, the obvious next step was what type of game this should be. I debated on AI or multiplayer, but decided that was outside of the scope of this project. I eventually landed on a simple time trial, which would challenge the player and hopefully make them want to push the game mechanics to the limit to get the lowest time possible.

Within that, I wanted the player to have to be more aware of the track and have to take advantage of the tight controls I had given them. This was solved, while having a discussion of the game over lunch with a friend who said the obvious solution, so obvious it had flown right past my head after being head deep in the project for over a month. That was to add obstacles and a shield to the player. This was a great learning opportunity for me, and a helpful reminder for my future projects.

With that, I added in obstacles and a shield the next day. With the main obstacles being the walls of the track and round cylinder obstacles that I could place anywhere on the track. Upon colliding with either, the player will be slowed down and pushed away from the obstacle, as well as deplete some of their shield.

With that, I added in obstacles and a shield the next day. With the main obstacles being the walls of the track and round cylinder obstacles that I could place anywhere on the track. Upon colliding with either, the player will be slowed down and pushed away from the obstacle, as well as deplete some of their shield.

Menu

For this project I created a menu in order to allow the user to choose between the available car models and select which track they want to race on. This helped deepen my understanding of UI elements and how to make an experience that is both easy to use for the user and easy for myself to update when adding in new tracks and cars.

Level

Course Design and Playtest Iteration

The first iteration of the track was made while developing the vehicle controller itself, and as such was sort of a mechanics testing ground. I also made the huge mistake of designing with actual art assets instead of greyboxing. Due to this, I ran into many issues of the gameplay becoming designed around the track rather than the track to fit the gameplay, as it was much more cumbersome to edit and change the track. All around, a big lesson learned.

I did however learn a lot from making this first failed track and it helped the production of the second track go much faster. I corrected my first mistake, by starting first with a greybox of the level, with as minimal detail as possible. With the gray box, two main objectives were sought after. I first and foremost attempted to make a fun course that started off narrow, introducing the player slowly to each mechanic at their disposal. I would then open up more, diverging into multiple routes, each presenting a unique challenge and focusing on particular mechanics.

The second objective was having multiple “visual plateau's”. These would be parts of the track that naturally created a view of the track, that builds up the character of the track and gives the player a more grand view of the track than their usual confined view on the track. Especially, since a tight and low visibility track was necessary in most places to enforce a sense of speed and adrenaline.

The first change in this new track was making it much larger than the original track had ever been. The point of this game was to go as fast as possible and challenge the human reaction speed, and it included gliding and speed boosts that multiplied that challenge. As such, the track needed to be long, such that it was not able to be cleared in an instant. Jumps would also need to be long enough that gravity would be significantly pulling down on the player by the time they reach the next piece of track, except in cases where there were available air boosts. Areas with air boosts do however require the player to hit most of the available boost to upkeep momentum and not fall out of the sky.

Environment Art

The level was aesthetically based off of the planet Crait from Star Wars Episode VIII, which was my favorite part of the movie. In order to create concept art, I first took a screenshot from the greybox at a few visual plateaus, sent them to my ipad, and used them as a base to paint over.

In order to be able to quickly model out the level, I needed a way to be able to use assets multiple times across the entire track without worrying about the texture stretching or scaling inconsistently. In order to achieve this, I created a triplar shader that would use world coordinates for the UV map. This meant that no matter the asset, I could scale it and rotate it however I wanted and the textures world scale would be consistent, and snow would only appear on pixels facing upwards. I could then mix this with normal maps baked from high poly sculpts per object if they were available.