Nat 5/Higher: Racers

Original Scratch Game

The original Racers game was made in a version of Scratch from 2009 which even in 2019 was archaic. The idea originally came from an example program inside of a Scratch idea book called "Coding For Beginners: Using Scratch" of a simple racing program the school had laying around I then kept expanding upon it with multiple courses with different themes, multiplayer using WASD keys for player one and arrow keys for player two and some light customisation to change the car's colours. I had worked on it in-between classes but at the end of year 4 we were told we had to make a game I decided to retool it into that.

3D Remake

The following year in Highers we were tasked to make another game but this time now in Unity, so with the leap in engine I wanted to take full advantage of it and do a 3D sequel of the original Racers game but due to some issues with the teacher being replaced with a substitute with minimal knowledge of games dev and the switch from Unity to another game engine called "Phaser" a simple JavaScript engine which didn't do any 3D. So for about 1.5 months all I could do was make models on a web program called Figuro as the computers did not have any modelling software and for my first experience of 3D modelling, it definitely could've been worse in tools and models. And in between making models working on my contingency plan; a small endless runner platforming game in Phaser in case the original teacher didn't come back before it was too late.

Eventually the normal teacher came back and with it I was one of the few guinea pigs who got to test out different game engine for the rest of the class called Godot and it was leagues better. So at long last I was finally able to actually do work on the game in an engine though a month in I had only gotten far enough to make the shopping level and was in the midst of making variants of shelving to wall off the tracks I came to the realisation that I would not be able finish everything I wanted with the little time I had left due to all of previous nonsense and had to quickly pivot to the following game to...

I had to abandon my project and all I got were these lousy models... Though I am somewhat fond of them, as limited and basic as they are.

2D Remake

Quickly pivoting from the 3D remake, I scrambled to change to something else deliverable and landed up on a port to Godot. I had to remake the tracks with the switch from 3:4 to 16:9 in tandem with the increase in resolution, as well as changing the space theme into a volcano due to me losing the original image of the asteroids meaning they could not enjoy the increase resolution and some other miscellaneous changes such as changing the player sprites to include numbers to avoid confusion.