Nakezato Pass
Date: February - April 2024
I love racing games and would love to be able to work on a racing game myself. So with this project I wanted to experience some different aspects of creating a racing game.
My main inspiration was the game Need For Speed: Carbon. It features intense downhill racing on mountain passes, known as 'Touge' racing.
There were 3 main objectives for me with this project:
- Design a racing course
- Set a vehicle up in Unreal Engine, and tune it to desired characteristics
- Making a self driving car that can navigate its way around a track
A lot of my inspiration comes from games like Need for Speed. There are a couple of corner sequences that are designed to resemble ones I've experienced and driven myself in game, as well as real-life racetracks.
The course is quite steep with a 200m elevation change for a ~2 min course. So to aid the driver, I added banking on difficult corners.
These alterations have made for a smoother ride, making the course more manageable. Some sections feel a bit more like roller coaster.
I also started on another course inspired by the Iroha slopes. A one way road with lots of consecutive hairpin corners.
When I started this project I was new to using splines in Unreal Engine. In order to make a road surface curved, I needed to add subdivisions in my road mesh so that it could bend more and look more curved
I had to create wheel blueprints so that I could finetune suspension, braking and grip values. I later also made a physics material to make the car less bouncy when hitting walls. I spent longer than I would have liked to getting the car to handle just right, and I am still not completely satisfied with it.
To help the player in getting round corners, I added an 'oversteer' control. This applies a small amount of torque to the car to boost cornering ability. Its not suitable for drifting, but could be used for it
My first version of my self driving car involved me drawing a line around the track, and rigging the car to turn right or left depending on which side of the line it was on in order to follow the line around the course
I have updated it so that car now steers a certain amount based on how far away it is from its line. If it is already close to to where it should be on the track, it doesn't have to turn very sharply. I have not had time to make as much progress on the self driving car as hoped