We’d like to share our thoughts behind the vehicle design in Reckless Racing 3 with you.
Our main priority for the game is to make it feel extra “Reckless”, meaning epic drifts, awesome racetracks and, of course, lots of cool cars. Thus, we’re creating a more diverse selection of vehicles, including everything in-between a sports car and large truck. Even though it might not be realistic to race a sports car against a truck, it sure is a lot of fun! It also adds a little extra depth and variation to the gameplay, since a heavy truck lets you smash right through different obstacles where a smaller vehicle would have to avoid it and take a less optimal route.
We’ve decided to be a little bold for this 3rd installment of Reckless Racing and excluded car performance tuning completely. This lets us create more individual personalities for each vehicle instead and make each and every one behave and feel differently. In the end this makes racing and the choice of ride much more interesting.
“So… how is a RR3 car created?” we asked one of our 3D vehicle artists.
“First we design and model a highly detailed car model – way too much detail to render real-time. This model is called the reference mesh.”
“After that the work to create lower detail models begin. In earlier Reckless Racing games we had different models in the garage and in-game (during the races), but now days phones and tablets are much more powerful so they can handle more detailed models. We’ve decided to use the garage models in-game as well now. It looks great!”
“The reference mesh is then used to generate normal maps and material maps. These are used to add back more detail to the models. Normal maps control, almost per pixel, the angle of the surface and our material maps tell the game engine what material goes where – I.e. glass, chrome, car paints, matte details etc.”
“When all the graphics are done it’s time to add all the technical stuff, like correctly name every separate part of a car, position it right and export it into the game.”
“Then our car physics designer does the rest! Setting up performance and car behaviors…”