Drive at Night

How to play

Hold the throttle and try to complete a lap as fast as possible, but try not to lose control of the car on corners. After completing a lap and the timer freezes, you can drive freely around the map, press pause to reset the game or quit out.

Specifications

The original project specifications required it to involve the idea of making the world a better place, it has since been updated to remove story elements to focus the project on the car driving gameplay.

Theme

When the project started, I was diving back into arcade racing games, so I wanted to experiment with a car controller, including wheel colliders and a working engine. 

The visuals of the game were inspired by Need for Speed Carbon with a dream-like touch added by the blue color of the sky. The music choice was inspired by the eurobeat music used in the anime Initial D.

Goal

I knew I wanted the car to feel a little slippery; the player should have full control over the car to correctly go around a corner at a high speed without driving off the road.

To focus as much time as possible on the car controller, I made the decision to have the player attempt runs for the best time. AI opponents and a custom racetrack would have taken more time, and would distract me from my goal for the project, which was to make a functioning car and learn as much as possible in the process.

Development

Wheel colliders were simple to implement but took a lot of trial and error to find the right values to get the driving closer to what I had envisioned. It's still not perfect but good enough for the scope of the project.

The center of mass of the vehicle is provided to the rigidbody component via script to have a realistic reference point simulating the distribution of mass of a real car (based on the  real Toyota 86/Subaru BRZ).

For the engine, I programmed a system that automatically changes between "gears" depending on speed that works similarly to the automatic transmission modes seen in popular racing games. The brake button puts the car in reverse "gear" when the speed of the car is close to 0, changing the brake button into reverse throttle and throttle button into brake (works similarly to the smart reverse controls seen in many racing games).

The tachometer smoothly follows the RPM of the engine and reflects changes in gears. I manage out-of-bounds by resetting the car to the last of many checkpoints and resetting physics variables to starting values.

Credits

• Programming, design and sound editing by me.
• Tachometer by me.
• Low-poly sports car #20 by Surdov Vadym
• Mountain Race Track - Night by AndreiNi
• Barrier & Traffic Cone Pack by Sabri Ayes
• Momcake-Bold WyonA by Rivian Art
• Digital-7 by Style-7
• Lonely Love by Sophie