Traffic Car 3D
Vira Games · Racing · 2024
Cars that feel physical and never leave the route the designer drew.
Context
A one-touch racer: hold your finger and the car drives, let go and it stops. That is the whole input, so everything the player feels comes from how the car moves.
Full physics was unpredictable and animation was dead, so the car runs on splines
Feel
Full physics gave a car that was alive but unpredictable, and pure animation along the route killed the feel entirely.
The answer was to run both at once: the car moves under real physics, while the trajectory is owned completely by the spline. It drifts through corners and bounces over hills, and it never leaves the road the designer drew.
The car is magnetised to the trajectory, so in the shipped game it effectively never leaves the road.
The level builder assembles a track out of dozens of small road pieces, each carrying its own spline, and the car resolves which spline it is riding at any moment.
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 car
- Movement that is physical and spline-bound at the same time.
- Recovery behaviour when the car leaves its line.
- Per-track logic for resolving which spline the car is riding.
- The tooling
- A route builder so the game designer could lay out and tune maps without a programmer.
More from the game
Project facts
- Year
- 2024
- Role
- Unity Developer
- Team
- Three-person pod — game designer, artist, me
- Scope
- Solo developer, concept to release
- Studio
- Vira Games
- Engine
- Unity, C#
- Platform
- Android · Google Play and Amazon Appstore
- Target device
- Amazon Fire 7 · 1 GB RAM
- Track
- Dozens of road pieces, each carrying its own spline
- Level tool
- The designer picks a road from a list and it builds itself in the scene
- Where to see it
- Amazon Appstore ↗ · listed as Traffic Car 3D