In off-road racing games, one of the most important features is great, realistic and playable maps to totally gets player attention so he can immerse in a game and make it interesting to play it more and more. We would present you a basic overview, which we utilized in this project with help of Unreal Engine 4.
NOTE: This article is not about coding, not about how to create real-time multiplayer systemsor to establish back-end system for your game while parsing data via PHP into engine, nor to create dynamic curving systems to minimize modeling time and to create non-linear world from linear maps and so - it's about something more dirtier of it but in same time very creative and fun, its about creating dirty maps in off-road games.
We did for years, many racing maps, for over 20 racing games, and some of them are optimized for mobiles in Unity 5, which offering great tools, and this would be a topic of the particular article about that games (i.e. Formula Carrer for mobiles (soon to be published) racing's which had over 22 real world tracks).
We utilizing this broad experiences in many engines into creating stunning racing experiences in Arizona Derby.
We really want to present to the racers, unseen and stunning experiences and we hope these roads, we have created, will make that possible.
We simply want to create this realistic experiences to the players, to bring them to the point of action in a unique way, not seen so far in racing games, and we think with right map, immersive level design, will evoke that emotion.
When making level design for racing game, most important thing about you need to take special care is track and it needs to have the best map, best resolution, best lighting, which you can produce, in order to get some attention.
If you take a look at this maps, you can see that dirty road are very detail designed, a lot of attention is given to the smallest details on the roads, to make it realistic and to stand out of other racing games.
We analyzing for years all racing games on the market and we starting from players position, what they want and how they need game plays, so making them really dirt roads, realistic with all this wet ground around, reflections of environments in totally realistic way, so you can even think that you get's into that dirt while playing game - this is our motto for level design, for this but also for other levels.
Our artists and level designers making road details in substance painter, textured them with mask and height map to create this inspiring off-roads game plays and you can judge if we succeed in it.
In racing games and real world racings, curvings are very important for additional actions, cornering, braking all this stuff which will test driver skills to the highest degrees, so we pass special care to enable them to the players in a wide variety to make the game very challenging.
and we created tons of outstanding road systems, junctions and others, based on it.
We're really happy to utilize our experience in level design of racing games in UE4 engine, which made us possible to be maximally creative (as Unity currently not offering such systems and when we making Unity racing games, we must model all roads in Max or Maya) and on top of that, UE4 system enabling maximum flexibility, as creating racing maps, need lot of changes, adaptation of the system, which you can easily adopt overall map - as is flexible to the road splines (i.e for making ups and downs), which would in Unity take a lot of time which can be spent in more creative ways (even with road plugins it's not so great like in UE4).
With all that in mind - for making race map in UE4, we are allowed to fully focus on artistic and creative ways, to produce that we planned for, in ways which really inspire us to make more and more things.
You can check, for us, this little piece of art (or dirt :) and judge if we succeed in it.
Some of Twitter fan told us:
