Technical Designer
Team Size
5
Time Frame
7 Weeks
Engine
Unity 3D
What is Full Tilt Circuit?
Full Tilt Circuit is a single player racing game where the player controls a motorcycle by sitting on a Wii Balance Board and physically leaning. As the player goes around the track, they leave a trail behind themselves. If the player drives within this trial, they get a speed boost. The goal is to complete three laps as quickly as possible!
My Role
For this project, our team wanted to build a 3D game as that would help create a more immersive experience and help in making the unconventional controller more intuitive, but we had several restrictions and limited experience working in 3D. My role was to rapidly build prototypes that would help us better understand the resources we have available and find out what was possible before investing too heavily into any particualr direction.
One of our biggest constraints was only being able to create 2D assets. This would prove to be tricky if we wanted a 3D game! I created a proof of concept in order to understand how we would be able to do this. By billboarding assets so they always point towards the camera, we can get objects to stick up from a flat ground. We could then leverage our setting of a Martian desert to simply tile a flat texture across an infinite plane and use billboarded rocks to try to break up the expanse.
Another large issue was how we were going to implement the track. At first I experimented with creating a modular track that I could link together one piece at a time. This idea could work however that limited the track to just 90 degree turns and straight aways and there was a massive issue with trying to detect whether or not you were on the track. Luckily, these short experiments were intentionally low scope so little was lost when I went to a new idea.
I instead looked into a solution using splines. By using curves, I could easily create a track of any shape with any type of turns I would like. This also meant there was a more precise mathematical way to determine the distance from the center of the track and therefore if the player is on or off the track. This also meant that instead of the artist creating an asset for every type of track we would want, they only needed to create 1 asset that we could tile across the whole track and allow the computer to curve it however it needs to using texture coordinates. I found this package by Sebastian Lague that implemented Bezier curves and also happened to have a demo that created a road mesh.
What I learned
This project was a very ambitious one and could have easily crumbled under our lofty goals; however, the rapid prototypes I built allowed the team to understand exactly what was possible early on so that we could find a scope that would work for everyone. This really nailed home the idea of early low scope experiments so that we could hit the bumps in the road well before we invest too heavily into one direction. I was able to practice identifying the biggest risks and finding ways to mitigate them.