Shape Transform Race
Vira Games · Racing · 2022
Overtake by changing what you are: car, runner, boat, drill. The studio reskinned it twice.
Context
A race where obstacles are not avoided but answered. Flat road wants a car, stairs want a runner, water wants a boat. Choose wrong and you stall.
The original of the shape-shifter — the studio reskinned it twice
Shape shifting
This is the original version of the shape-shifting racer. It went out before the later one and without procedural mesh generation.
It became popular quickly and ended up as one of the studio's best-performing games, which is why the company shipped it twice more under different skins.
I built one of those reskins myself. The second was built by another developer, and I was moved onto that project to make it feel right. I read his code, found what was breaking the feel, fixed it, and then walked both him and the game designer through what the problem had been — the handling and the moment of transformation are the whole game, and they do not survive being approximated.
Worth calling out
I built this one end to end — gameplay, menus, progression, shop, skins, tutorial, ads and store builds. These are the parts worth naming.
- The game
- Shape shifting and the movement model behind each form.
- The obstacle language that tells the player which form a section wants.
- After release
- One of the two reskins, built end to end.
- Handing the feel over to another developer building the second reskin.
More from the game
Project facts
- Year
- 2022
- Role
- Unity Developer
- Team
- Three-person pod — game designer, artist, me
- Scope
- Solo developer, concept to release
- Studio
- Vira Games
- Released as
- Calibro Games
- Engine
- Unity, C#
- Platform
- Android · Google Play and Amazon Appstore
- Target device
- Amazon Fire 7 · 1 GB RAM
- Order
- Third commercial project
- Reskins
- Shipped twice more, one of them as Shift Master
- Forms
- As many as the later reskin — what Shift Master added was procedural mesh generation, not more vehicles
- Road
- Assembled from ready pieces; the road-building tool I reused across later runners started here
- Feel handover
- Read another developer code on the second reskin, found the problem and walked him and the designer through the fix
- Where to see it
- Amazon Appstore ↗ · listed as Shape Transform Race