Conquer sharp turns, and push your limits against the clock. Designed for speed enthusiasts, SpeedStage brings the thrill of rally racing straight to your screen... With some extra bits:
This browser based demo gives you a taste of the action.
There's a ghost in this machine ... Rally does not have much head-to-head action, so you get to race against your own best time (or that of friends). Which is shown as a ghost car. This takes frantic competition up an extra notch. Also means you cannot hide that little shortcut. Oh yes, shortcuts, this game does not constrain you to a few metres each side of the track like some. You are free to race any way.
We have also built in a track editor which allows you to design your own tracks and challenge your friends to race them.
I wanted this to take advantage of more capable devices but at the same time not be lazy. I see not many titles for TV's simply because phones seem to be replaced every few years (or more). TV's often last 10+ years so my target was for it to gracefully step down but still look good running on my low-end TV box with a 2012 Mali-450 GPU (like those on Amazon for about $20).
Actually, it turned out to be not so tough as first thought. Optimising terrain was the biggest task, but after making some custom LOD mesh tiling utilities as well as a few shader tricks later and I was getting results multitudes better than any engine defaults (and didn't drop bump maps at the first sign of difficulty). It had the unexpected effect of looking better on highend devices too, by way of easily adjusting LOD levels dynamically based on framerate.
Even though I opted for game over simulation type experience, I still wanted to make it believable. Car physics uses a lot of code but doesn't need to use much time to run. I just had to keep in mind while crafting the terrain, that I would need the terrain data under each wheel at runtime to adjust tire and suspension response (mainly using triangulated vertex-colour to reduce texture lookups). An important part of car handling is the anti-roll bars connected to the suspension, I think many miss that and end up constantly "tweeking" with lowering the centre of gravity too much instead.