In case you haven’t seen posts from me before, Hi! My name is Cas!
It’s been a while since I made a post on the Dev Forum just showcasing something I was working on…
However that changed when I entered a GameJam and had the theme be “E-Sports”
We had to come up with a game that was both unique (We’re not creating “YAS: Yet Another Shooter”), and competitive…And we came up with the idea for a Car driving game inspired by the old Micro Machines series. So instead of traditional driving, your car is basically on ice physics and you Tokyo drift like an absolute madman.
This won’t be about “How I did things,” more, “WHAT I did”
If you know me, then you know my studio - Critical-20 - is working on a Kart Racer at the moment (Which you can see here)…However we couldn’t just finish this and submit it as its own entry
For this Game Jam we had to start from scratch, no just polishing up a game you had sitting around. Everything had to have been started AFTER October 1st. And we have until November 27th to finish. Erego we had to recreate our assets, and we had to redesign our controller
This was our original mesh for my Kart Racer, And we had to make a new one, luckily I’ve improved my model-making skills in blender since I made this mesh a year ago. So adding a little of my know-how I made a new model, only instead of taking inspiration from the CTR Go-Kart, I made this one based off the classic Pipe-Frame from Mario Kart
A kart mesh by itself is pretty weak though…After all it didn’t even have any wheels yet! But after modelling the wheels and putting the frame together, we had to get the kart moving!
The driving is supposed to be very arcade-themed and we can’t exactly use Springs and constraints to truly get the feel of that. So I decided to take something I learned from my original Kart Racer and use a rolling sphere to get my movement.
The game can detect the kart’s throttle and steer by attaching a Vehicle Seat, then we can use the ball’s Velocity to move the kart, all we have to do is tell the ball to move wherever the kart is facing…
Is what I would say If I wasn’t a big dumb dummy head!
We need to be able to make sure the kart stays where the ball is! While we could do this using align position, that alone may not be enough so I made some alterations to the ball movement. Now the ball is locally controlled by whoever is steering the kart. This gives us the added benefit of both input response, but allows us to just set the kart to be where the ball is.
And just like that we have movement! However it didn’t quite feel right, as I was only going in one direction, forwards! I could steer but that clearly wasn’t enough, So I did some googling and found a good way of figuring out when to slip and when to steer.
So when I put all of that together What I got was pretty sweet, I even added some trails to act as the tires skidding when you drift
you can check it out here!
Next on our todo list will be making the overhead camera, adding some tracks, and creating some racing functionality! This has been Cas, and I’ll see you next time!