There are certain factors in a games environment design that can have a huge impact on the players experience, coming from a background in games like World of Warcraft and Age of Empires II (boomer dad nerd) – I’m all too aware that graphics really aren’t at the heart of the best games, it’s the little things you don’t really notice until they’re not there.

When you run through a meadow for example, a blade or two might disperse, a bird might fly over head, or even just a butterfly floating nearby. They’re part of your real world surroundings and are the little details that really immerse you into the world, the level, you forget you’re playing a game in a sense.

Jibber jabber, rambling on about butterflies and blades of grass “dispersing” haha – ok. So when you look at a racing game, particularly circuit/track style racing games, you need to visualise what’s happening there – easier to do with a quick youtube search for “formula 1 race”.

Let’s break it down.

Audience.

The audience can’t be still and static. People very very rarely stand still for any length of time, so we’ll start there. The audience isn’t part of any game mechanics, so the whole thing is split into 2 pieces to keep the polygon count down and the game size as low as possible. Then I’ve animated them in 2 different directions (unity timeline) so we have abit of life in the stands.

Bystanders

When you’re at a racing track, no matter how dirty it might be, you watch the cars go by – your head physically turns as they pass. So that’s another thing I made sure was abit more life-life. Animating some bystanders around the edges of the arena.

Some have important jobs, like operating imaginary TV station cameras.

Dirt, wind and rain.

This one’s a no brainer, weather and weather-based ground effects come standard in most video games today, the ones worth playing atleast. With our low-fidelity graphics and fast-paced game modes I did face a couple of challenges with getting these effects to feel dynamic. It can’t rain on half the track, for 10 seconds, and we can’t have dirt kicking up from asphalt road surfaces, there’s no dirt there. Silly monkey.

The compromise right now was for weather to be preset in tiers (sunny, rainy, stormy) and it’ll be randomly assigned at the start of a game. I’ll be totally honest with you – it was taking too long so this is a patch-over for now until I can revisit it down the road, I do want to do something more dynamic with it.

Wildlife

Wildlife was difficult really, since there isn’t really much going on in terms of cute bunnies or angry bunnies for that matter, in a dirt pit style race track. I added a couple of easter eggs in a nod to some of the larger and more universally recognized blockchain projects that our target audiences can relate too. They potter around, they’re just “there” really, I’ll revisit them more in the future as we expand our track lineup.

That pretty much wraps it up really, that’s how I’m bringing some life to the tracks to help immerse the players more in the world.