Desert Velocity

game
car
car
car

Inspiration

Desert Velocity began as a personal challenge: I wanted to discover how far a non-professional game developer could go by combining a clear creative vision with Codex and GPT-5.6.

I work full-time in real estate in Rome, so I built this project entirely during evenings, weekends, and the small pockets of free time left between my professional commitments. This made the project especially meaningful to me: every feature was designed, tested, corrected, and improved step by step alongside my daily work.

What it does

Desert Velocity is a 3D desert racing game developed in Godot. It includes two different driving experiences:

Endurance races with checkpoints and time management
Special stages focused on precision, speed, and route completion
Multiple difficulty levels
Two playable vehicles with different characteristics
Dynamic desert environments, canyons, dust, sunset lighting, obstacles, and collectibles
A custom HUD, timing system, checkpoints, and race progression
Optimized 3D assets, materials, LODs, and environment elements

How I built it

I used Godot and GDScript for the game, while Codex and GPT-5.6 supported the development process across the repository.

Codex helped me:

design and implement gameplay systems
debug scripts and scene-loading issues
build checkpoints, timers, HUD logic, and difficulty balancing
create and refine 3D vehicle and environment assets
review code and prevent regressions
run validation passes and performance checks
organize long development tasks into structured milestones

The project was developed iteratively through repeated cycles of implementation, testing, correction, and visual review.

Challenges

The main challenge was building a complete and coherent game within a very limited amount of personal time.

Other challenges included:

balancing the timer and checkpoint system across different difficulty levels
maintaining stable performance on modest hardware
integrating detailed 3D assets without excessive draw calls
solving Godot parser, resource, and scene-loading issues
keeping the project stable while making frequent gameplay and visual improvements
coordinating complex development tasks through Codex without losing control of the repository

Accomplishments

I am proud that Desert Velocity evolved from a simple idea into a playable 3D racing experience.

The project now includes:

a complete gameplay loop
multiple game modes and difficulty levels
custom vehicles and desert environments
validated checkpoint and timing systems
performance optimization for lower-end hardware
a structured AI-assisted development workflow

Most importantly, I completed it while continuing my full-time work, using only my free time and a strong desire to learn, experiment, and build something real.

What I learned

This project taught me that AI-assisted development is not only about generating code. It is also about planning, reviewing, testing, correcting, and making decisions.

I learned how to work more effectively with Codex, how to break complex goals into smaller milestones, how to validate changes before continuing, and how to combine human creative direction with AI-supported implementation.