As referenced in my Canada, Games, and Life post, I am making a turn based, card based, deck building racing game for my final project in Game Tech 2. Something that I struggled with for a long time was figuring out how I wanted to get the movement working. I knew that I wanted the player to be able to play cards which would move them, but I wasn’t sure how I wanted to go about that. I started with simple physics movement, but I kept catching on small bumps in the track. Next I tried using Wheel Colliders, which worked quite well, but would take forever to tweek and feel right. I flirted with using animation based movement, but that was quickly shot down when I thought about adding other cars to the track. So, that left me with NavMesh movement. This worked surprisingly well, and through some variable modifications, I made a nice simulation of a race. I have a video of it below.
Now the keyword right now is “simulation”. See, when making the simple “AI” for the cars, I applied it to the main character as well. As such, there isn’t any way to actually control the car, and thus, no game. But next I’m going to be adding a way to control the car, so it will be playable soon. However, I am really happy with how I set up the cars.
There are points in the middle of each section of track that the car’s NavMesh Agent want to go towards. To make it more fair, I also randomized the position the car is going to across the track. This way the cars won’t all be heading to one central point. Next, I gave the cars a very generous range on the checkpoint completion, so that they will have even more room to spread out and race. As for the actual racing, I have two variables that get edited. They are the speed and acceleration. Each time a car moves on to the next point on the track, they will be given a random speed and acceleration. This random range is set to be only slightly slower and faster than the player’s car. This way, cars will be moving around each other a lot and give off the impression of smarter AI.
The only difference is the player’s car. This car is never randomized, and it’s speed and acceleration is set to be slightly less than the midpoint of the random range. This takes from the idea of the Tortoise and the Hare. A steadily moving object with a set, conflict free path will usually be faster than a sporadic, conflict filled path. After running the “game” for a few times, I see this is confirmed. The player wins ~75% of the time. Knowing this, I can balance the game to make sure it has an easy barrier to entry, since I know the player might get tripped up on the main mechanics.
