Carvival Dev diary 1

My game is called Carvival, and this game is actually a spontaneous project. One day I decided to develop vehicle physics in unity just for fun. Making vehicle physics is a very enjoyable thing for me, because I know a lot about vehicles and I want to simulate them realistically.

That’s when a game called Brotato caught my eye on youtube, it’s a very fun top down-bullet hell game where you manage a potato and blast incoming aliens. After watching the video of the game I immediately fell in love with it and I bought the game and started playing it. The graphics, sounds, music and controls of the game were very good, but what I liked the most was that we can add new weapons to the potato, we can attach 6 weapons to the potato and each weapon has different properties, which makes the gameplay very fun.

And that’s when I had an idea: What if instead of a potato we could drive a fast car? I was very excited about this idea, because I could make a game like this using my vehicle physics. I immediately opened unity and started to develop my vehicle physics a little bit more. I added a drift feature to my vehicle physics, so the car could slide around corners and make it a more fun driving experience. I never thought an arcade car physics could be so fast and beautiful.

So how did I make this vehicle physics? It’s actually very easy, everyone who develops games in unity has made a ball rolling game, so I made a ball in the same way and made the vehicle body follow it. So the movements of the ball were reflected in the movements of the vehicle.

via GIPHY

But is that enough? I mean, we just put a ball and we connect the car to it, but I can’t adjust how much the car turns, how much the car drifts, so I thought about it and decided to use animationcurves. With animationcurves, the game could dynamically change values like friction and drag, so I could have full control over the physics of the car.