Caaargh Game Development Blog #3 – Complexity from Simplicity

In my last post a few weeks back I was pondering whether to add more complex track segments to the game (Caaargh!) as a way to make more interesting tracks. It must have been a good question, as it’s kept me occupied for the best part of a month.

In the end, I found I was able to generate many more, more-interesting tracks by making the component pieces even smaller and simpler than they were before.

new_style_pieces — New style track pieces are much smaller

As part of this process I updated the scripts that generate these tracks to work with arbitrary directions and angles which also freed me up to use vertical space as well as horizontal in the game. This means tracks can now cross over themselves in interesting ways.

Track's can now vary in height — Track’s can now vary in height

There was a bunch of new modelling work to-do, and I can’t overstate how much I’ve been enjoying using Sketch-up to make these. It’s such a human friendly piece of software given what it can do, and it exports nicely enough to .fbx files to work with in Unity.

sketch_up_deadend — Modelling a deadend segment in SketchUp

The new track modelling work has let me fix up the aesthetic and practical (in game physics) issues that were bugging me with the original track pieces, and at the same time make the track a bit narrower which better suits the single-player game-play.

Here's the car relative to the track — Here’s the size of the car relative to the track

Here’s a quick sample of generating a bunch of random tracks of a specific length.

There’s still plenty to tweak in here, but the next design decisions about tracks can’t properly be evaluated until some of the other game mechanics are in place, and what’s here goes through some more play-testing.

Also, banked corners looked fun, but didn’t play well. Sorry banked corners.

Also published on Medium.

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