Racing Game
This project was my first year final exam for my Game Engine subject. Being quite new at working with engines,
my abilities were quite limited. The assignment was to make a racing game within a small time gap, that included
a specific number of Power-Ups, like the ones in Mario Kart, which I will disclose below.
In addition, it required two different perspectives depending on the mode. For single player it would be a third person
perspective, from the back of the car controlled by the player, while an AI competitor would go through very specific
checkpoints to try reach the end of the race to beat the player.
Unfortunately by the time I recorded the videos for this website, I needed to update the engine version which broke
quite a few things, like the AI vehicle on Singleplayer or the checkpoints in the LAN & Multiplayer.
Similar to how it works in Mario Kart, players can collect Power-Ups in the form of cubes. Then, trigger them
whenever they want.
These powers are the following:
- Making the vehicle smaller
- Making the vehicle bigger
- Slowing down
- Speeding up
Player Set-Up has the mouse and keyboard for player one, while each controller (referred to as gamepads)
connected will act as an additional player.
The camera would then register the position of each player and adjust the zoom and the location to keep everyone
within view. If players were close to each other, the camera would zoom into the action, but the greater the distance,
the more centered and far away the camera would be from the players.
My main challenge during this project was my programming experience and the information available to make a
multiplayer game. The Unreal Documents were not updated, and things did not work the way explained in the text.
Which resulted in a lot of time used to research and multiple attempts/testing of the multiplayer.
I decided to fake the AI by setting a specific array of positions which the vehicle will move towards.
I yet did not have any experience with pathfinding and adapting the vehicle actor to be able to reach those
without artificially moving; it was far from my reach due to inexperience and time restraints.
Another obstacle faced, was that the physics of the vehicles themselves were quite extreme which led it to flip
pretty easily. My solution was to put a trigger on the top of the car and use it to determine if it was flipped
based on rotation and location. If the trigger happened, the player would be teleported to a checkpoint based on
the last one crossed.
I think this project really improved my ability to research and think outside the box to solve problems using
the tools at my disposal and my overall adaptability to new obstacles and challenges that may spontaneously
appear during production.
I believe that being able to deal with new arriving blockades within a reduced amount of time can do wonders
for efficiency and matching restrictive deadlines.
In addition, not being able to reach out to a professor or classmates for assistance with issues outside of my
knowledge reinforced my individuality and assertiveness towards tackling problems in the future.