BEAT THE LOOP
Game Designer & Gameplay Programmer
Challenge yourself in this fast paced top-down racing game and race through growing modular tracks while combining power-ups. Mix and match different combinations and grind the leaderboards.
DESCRIPTION AND RESPONSABILITIES
Beat The Loop was made during Ludum Dare 47, where the theme was "Stuck in a loop". Every successful lap (Time Attack) unlocks a new track part where you can gather stackable upgrades for your ship, changing the vehicle's behavior, player's driving approach and challenges. It was the first time I handled a feature from start to finish (Character Controller), and the first time I felt cosy in Unity's documentation.
DEVELOPPED SKILLS
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Getting things done ASAP when dirty prototyping
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Further understanding of physics-based Character Controllers & Vector Math
Unity
3
3 Days
YEAR
2021
GENRE
Racing
Single Player
PLATFORM
PC / itch.io
FAST PROTOTYPING, FAST ITERATION
Zoom On - Turning (yes, that's the whole thing)
PRIORITIZING CRITICAL FEATURES
THE PROBLEM OF OVERENGINEERING
When designing the behavior and feel of Turning, I went deep down the rabbit hole almost instantly with complex torques, velocity-based drifts and inertia, etc. And so I spent a good 2 to 3 hours trying to get my math and everything perfectly, even though not much was working in the first place.
Trying to understand what went wrong when everything was already so complex, without having confirmed that the basics were correctly working was when it hit me: whether it's design or its implementation, prototyping is all about figuring out things step by step.
KNOWING YOUR SCOPE
Even though Turning is a central mechanic for a racing game (who would have thought), in the case of a game jam, this is not where the focus should be. Polish and gamefeel are essential sure, but what we were trying to do here is offer a fresh mechanic (stackable upgrades) and see how things work out. This is where our critical feature was. And by reducing Turning to its very basics, it ultimately allowed me to focus more intensely on that feature and iterate where it mattered.
FOCUSING ON THE BASICS
What are the ABSOLUTE fundamentals of your feature? What do you need NOW to get a feel for your mechanic?
Turning out Beat The Loop wasn't about Torques, Drifting and Inertia, yet. It was about applying a simple rotation to a Rigidbody moving forward, and see where to go from there.
