Pizza go-vroom

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• Engine used: Unity

• Year of production: 2018

• Group Project

• Role played: Lead programmer/Designer

• Duration: 5 months

• Genre: Game for kids/ Racing

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Pizza Go Vroom is a 3D toon styled racing game for kids with Pizza characters as the car drivers wherein the kids have to assemble their own car in AR using daily objects and drive around a pizzeria (Restaurant, Kitchen & Backyard).

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My role during the entire project was of a programmer and a designer. 

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Intentions: 

The main intention as a programmer was to make sure the code was bug free and optimised to run smoothly on any Android device. Making editor-based scripts in Unity was also another objective I had to aim for as a programmer as it makes it very easy for designers to tweak the values during runtime and testing takes less effort. 

The new areas that were touched by me as a programmer was using Vuforia for AR as the building phase was completely in AR.

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During the conception phase, we were given constraints by our head (Game for kids, An AR element & should be made in 3D) & based around these constraints we designed the idea around pizza racing characters in a pizzeria wherein they have to deliver themselves from point A to B.

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Intentions as a designer in this project was to balance hardcoded values of the cart so the other level designers could tweak it out according to their level. 

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Achievables: 

A lot of research had to be done regarding the vehicle physics in order to achieve the design we planned. Over a month of research on different vehicle aspects were done. A lot of other code packages were also looked at in order to get an idea of how to implement the code. Friction, Drag, ESP, ABS, Anti-Roll bars are a few aspects that were researched on.

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The second most development time consuming process was implementation of AR. Vuforia was a new technology that was worked with and a lot of problems occurred in the start but with the help of online community all of this was solved quite easily.

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A lot of play-testing and run through of the game had to be done throughout the development phase as I had to develop an object that should be affected by real life physics (Car) and so in order to achieve the desired result a lot of tweaking was done with values. The major problem occurred was when I had to make the car drift and generate Skid Marks on the ground to give a real smooth effect but however with enough research even that was achieved.

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Rights & Wrongs: 

All of the design ideas were implemented successfully in the game. Every character with special ability, power-ups, track elements and gameplay ingredients were successfully programmed for and put in the levels. The AR part was working quite well and the car customization could be done as per the choice of the player. The game was polished and looked really well.

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Learning Outcomes:

Vehicle physics and different aspects are just a few things that I learned from this project. Working on a big project with a proper team made me understand team coordination and how to achieve everything in a timeline. Learning how the racing games work made me understand more about the programming aspect for games. Also, working with Vuforia I understood how AR games work and how to implement AR in any game or a project and how to make it look good.

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