Game Overview

Street Rider is a battle racing game with players racing vehicles in a cassette futuristic world, combating other racers by crashing into them. The game takes inspiration from the Cruis’n series with combat leaning into something like Twisted Metal and Wreckfest all the while having a PS1 aesthetic in its visuals.

Development

My work on this game consisted of the following:

• Use Blender to create a working track for the game’s downtown level, “Downtown Girl”.

• Build and texture the cities found within the “Danger Zone” and “Downtown Girl” levels.

• Discuss with the team lead the vision for the levels he designed that I was working on.

The Idea: Downtown Level

This whole project was an interesting endeavor because it was the first time I came into a project to build levels that had already been designed by someone else. The level, “Downtown Girl”, had no visual direction nor lore attached to it, however. The lead merely told me to do what I wanted and to simply consult him and other team members on my decisions to make sure it all made sense to the game and the dev work needed. My idea for Downtown Girl began with a city with two sides like a coin. One side was a ghetto where the workers and lower class lived at the whims of the corporations that neighbored them. Those corporations composed the other half of the level. I had some decent freedom to visually make the level however I wanted it to be, so I decided to make the ghetto area composed of warmer colors while the corporate side would be a lot cooler color-wise. By the end of my time building this level, I started to implement lighting and went with a bright purple to keep that colorful nighttime cyberpunk/cassette futurism is known for.

The Idea: Highway Level

Halfway through my work on Downtown Girl, I was asked to help finish the game’s highway level, “Danger Zone”. One of our team members built the playable area of the level, but the city needed a lot of work. The before pictures represent what I was given, and the after represents my tune-up. This whole thing was a very nice way to do a small and simpler version of what I was doing on the downtown level, and it helped me in the direction of how I envisioned the downtown area (especially in stuff like texturing).

The Lesson

I’d say my biggest lesson from this whole project was how to more effectively work under someone else’s vision. In all my projects before this, I was kind of given the reigns on how to tackle what I created as long as I stuck to the general idea and themes the game was based on. This is especially so because I was the one coming up with the level ideas. For Street Rider, however, a lot of this was already laid out and I was simply tasked to build someone else’s idea. Yes, the visuals and lore for the downtown level came from me, but I still had to heavily consult with the lead and designer of the base for that level before my stuff got through (something I did very lightly in other projects). My biggest nitpick with the final products here are probably the visuals. I wish I’d gotten more textures, so the visual variety of the buildings was bigger. I had about 18 different textures to work with. I should have at least gotten about 26-28, and ideally around 34-36.