Prototyping

My teammate and I first brainstormed and wrote down ideas for the game, and we took some inspiration from games we've played in the past like The Long Drive, Easy Delivery CO, GTA, and Pacific Drive. My role is to design and code the game. Dom will also help with design and do modelling. We'll be using Unity and Blender mostly.

We decided to have driving as a core mechanic in the game, so I made a few different versions of car controllers from youtube tutorials to test them out and see which felt the most fun.

The first versions had wheel colliders which felt like a real car, but, after testing for a few hours, we decided something more arcade-style would feel and play better. The prior car used a lot of inertia and forces to control, with the two front wheels controlling turning.
The newer one starts up much quicker and turns by rotating the entire car using a quaternion rotation.



We want the player to have more control over the car. I kept the project in case we decide to go for a realistic driving sim. I added a bunch of random cubes to graybox a simple environment. Dom and I made some basic cars and a truck in Blender to use as placeholder models.

 
I changed the wheel colliders and used translations and normalized the direction so it feels a lot more like an arcade/Mario Kart styled car.
Using cinemachine I was able to make a really cool looking drift effect on the car which we kept in.

I got some great advice from people in my class on gameplay loops and win/loss conditions which helps in the direction we're gonna go. Get it? Direction we're gonna go? (It's a car game)



Our initial ideas had a bunch of upgrades and roguelike mechanics with enemy AI following the player and the player being able to destroy them, but this seems like way too much to create for the project, so we're going for a delivery/pickup game with driving and physics being the main mechanics. Timers and point amounts are the win/loss condition.