Daniel Nijkamp

Space Race

Project Information

  1. Dev team & Development environment
  2. Development Process
  3. Gameplay
  4. Post Mortem

Game mechanics showcase

  1. Movement
  2. Obstacles
  3. Environment
  4. 3D Art

GitHub

Trello

Build

Project Information

The project was called Expanding Space but after some brainstorming we called it Space race, we had 8 weeks to make a space-themed game and we had to we had to work with Scrum and sprint, each sprint being 2 weeks. But there were no other requirements we had to integrate into our game, unlike other projects we were free to do anything with the game because this was the first big project at the time.

This project we had a big development team, 4 game artists and 4 developers. At the time we were still learning unity so we just used that as our engine, the version is 2020.3.5f1. The artists used Cinema 4D for all of the 3d models and photoshop for the textures Here is the credit to the other people who worked on this project:

When we originally brainstormed we had alot of ideas and we wanted to have 3 maps in the game and ideas for some game mechanics like turrets and AI cars, but due to time constrains we scrapped those ideas. we also decided to only work on 1 map instead of 3. after that we worked on various things but one of the devs in our team wanted to work on movement and got stuck on it for 4-5 weeks. eventually it worked but it was not perfect but we didnt have enough time to rework it so the movement is a bit wonky we also had a few failed git merges and merge conflicts here and there and 1 dev had a broken laptop for a while This was the first school project where i really did almost everything, its easier to list what i didnt make: The ingame speedometer UI, Powerups, Finishline script The playermovement was originally done by someone else but since they took too long i picked it up and fixed most issues or changed some of the code.

The gameplay is pretty simple, the goal is to complete 2 laps and dodge laser obstacles that are in the way of some parts of the road. the powerups on the ground gives you a temporary boost, you can also hold shift while you are holding W to go a bit faster then the normal speed

We eventually got everything together and at the time we were very proud of the game, still to this day i kind of am because altough the game technically isnt very impressive i just find the art and graphics really nice. The school organized a kind of game jam-esc event where people could vote on which game was the best and that day everyone had a seperate part of a room where they could setup their laptop with promotional footage almost like a convention everyone had a paper were people could write their feedback about the game, we had alot but we never had to implement it or anything. eventually we all got outside to hear who won. there were alot of good games i think deserved 1st place but when i heard them on 2nd or 3rd place i was thinking who could have gotten first, turns out we won! altough we only got some stickers as a reward i was very happy that we won in the first place

Game Mechanics

The player can use WASD to move and you can go faster if you hold down W + LSHIFT. heres a video of the player moving through the map. there is 2 scripts for the movement, 1 to actually move the player and 1 to move the player model which are on seperate objects

Here you can see a in-engine screenshot of how the player looks, the green ball is the object that moves around the player, instead of just going forward it rolls forward like a ball

Here you can see one of the obstacles that are usually around the track, they are mostly there for aesthetic purposes, but they can all kill the player, as in if you touch them you reset back to the beginning they all have the same HoverScript that allows them to move up and down. they also all have the DeathBarrier script which does the resetting

here you can see the lasers that are in the triangle parts of the track, they move left to right and use the same HoverScript like the other obstacles and also uses the DeathBarrier script

Here you can see a part of the track that one of the artists was working on, very early in development we all had the same idea of having a kind of vaporwave neon look to our game, and we wanted to have it kind of be like rainbow road from mario, we eventually came up with the idea to have things around the track and they eventually made these triangle shaped corridor, initially we wanted them to spin around but we didnt have enough time to implement it

We also have these towers that kind of connected the lasers, these were mostly for looks. if you look closely theres also a turret on 1 of the towers that we originally wanted to have as a feature/game mechanic where it would shoot at the player, but due to time constrains we couldnt do it