Context

Clearly, to make a racing game, we need something to do the racing in. Smooth and responsive Race Kart physics is necessary to build the highest quality gameplay experience, as it's the way the player directly interfaces with the gameplay.

Goals

Smooth movement via tight controls
Easy to pick up and learn
Modular/easy to iterate upon

Design

Summary

The Kart Mechanics is how the player interacts with their own racer and how other racers interact. At its heart, the movement of the kart will be controlled via the physics engine in Unity. It also must incorporate a state machine paradigm, such that it is scalable to add new racer-to-racer interactions.

The work required to make this feature:

A kart controller script that includes the basic movement (accelerating, steering, drifting).
A state machine to support racer-to-racer interactions (namely power-ups). Allows for more iteration and gives us direct control over how the kart behaves at a given time.
Kart model and animation control (steering wheel, turning the wheels, spinouts, etc).
Kart-coin interaction (collection, spending).

Edge cases

The discussion of “going off-road” needs to be taken into account. Because we are using a LOT of random generation; methods upon which we have little to no control over the outcome, we have to account for poorly generated maps.

To combat this, we simply spawn boundaries around the track so the players are confined to the track.