Pocket RC Cars

Selfie podium
Tournament rewards
Items in garage
Lap Master minigame
Minigames area
Baloon Pop minigame

Inspiration

I wanted to improve Pocket RC Cars by making it more fun, social, and rewarding - for both casual and competitive players.

What it does

I added three main features:

Minigames with scoring and coins
Shop and Garage for cosmetic rewards
Tournament mode with season leaderboards, prizes, and a selfie podium

How I built it

Minigames:

I created two minigames: Balloon Pop - pop balloons with various scores; and Lap Master - complete as many laps as possible in 60s, with obstacles on the road!

Every minigame works like this: 60s game -> 10s results -> 3 preparation -> repeat. No need to wait in a queue. Join any time. I noticed younger players are impatient and don't want to wait doing nothing.

You get 1 coin if you finish minigame. Get +1 coin for each player you beat in the minigame. Want more coins? Bring more friends! System is modular so it's easy to implement new minigame.

Shop and Garage:

I used Shop and Inventory gizmo from Assets. Heavily modified it to meet my needs. Some items can be purchased with coins, some with meta credits, and other can be obtained by completing special quests. You can get balloon hat only by completing quest - score 60 points in Balloon Pop minigame. Or you can get trophy hat only by getting into podium in tournament.

Tournament track:

A special track appears for a one month. You can enter the tournament only if you complete all standard tracks (get bronze medals for all tracks) Players race to get the best lap time.
The top 10 players are shown on the leaderboard.
If someone beats your time later, you can lose your spot, so it encourages the player to check the game. When the tournament ends, players have some time to claim rewards:

Top 3 get trophy hats
Others in the top 10 get a cardboard crown
All get coins

You can stand podium to take a selfie and share it with friends. If you are one of 3 players from the podium - there will be confetti. :) After tournament end date, there will be 10 days for collecting rewards and then new tournament starts, and past results are saved on a board showing the last 5 tournaments.

Challenges I ran into

Creating a loop that keeps players engaged without waiting.
Syncing between world instances with World Persistent Variables to avoid race condition
Season leaderboard system was more complicated then I expected.
Customizing Shop and Inventory gizmo was not easy work.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Fast and fun minigame loop
Shop/garage system that uses both coins and Meta Credits and rewards from quest
Seasonal tournament with persistent leaderboards and visual rewards. System uses World Persistent Variables and is easy to expand in the future, I just need to design and replace a track and change one variable in code.
Shareable moments with the selfie podium

What I learned

I learned how to build progression systems that work for different player types — from casual to competitive. Also, working with World Persistent Variables was fun to work with, to handle race condition between worlds.

What's next for Pocket RC Cars

Now my main plan is to optimize the game and to introduce better designed environment. Also, I plan to improve steering on mobile with Focused Interaction.