No Brakes

“No Brakes” seemed like a perfect title for a racing game with ridiculously simple controls. All it takes from the user to drive a virtual race car is touching the screen to throttle and rotate the device for steering. No hard braking.

To make it possible, several challenges had to be overcome. Starting with the steering controls. The access to raw accelerometer data isn’t yet available in Lens Studio, so I came up with a yet undocumented workaround to access it.

The other challenge was figuring out how to make the race track creation as simple as possible – by reducing this process to manually pushing few points around that define the track curve.

Working on the visuals and creating a nightly atmosphere in the game was equally important to me. This is where the ability to create custom shader materials with Lens Studio was really handy. While this hackathon entry contains rather few race car paintjobs and customisation options, there’s an endless possibility to create more of those for monetization if this project goes forward.

In order to make the code do what I need using minimal computing resources, the car’s physics and collisions were created from scratch, initially prototyped in Processing before rewriting all the core classes in JavaScript. As a result the car is able to drift around the race track once the tires go weary. It happens gradually and can be fixed by collecting the tire bonus that spawns in the track now and then. Other bonuses include boost recharge and coins which can be spent on car upgrades. Another way now to earn coins is by beating the lap times and setting new personal records.

The main challenge and a lesson for me was the implementation of Sync framework to allow players compete against each other in real-time.

As a little extra, I’ve added the anaglyph mode to the game for those who have cheap 3d glasses laying around and want to get immersed into the game even more.

The only challenge I’ve left to the player is remembering to blink the eyes once in a while because the gameplay is extremely captivating. You’ve been warned.

Built With

• javascript
• syncframework