WHAT THE CAR: SANDSTORM
FURY ROAD x SUBWAY SURFERS
After What The Car shipped, pitches were solicited from the team for new episodes to expand the game post-launch.
My pitch: take one part infinite-runner, and one part Mad Max: Fury Road, and combine them into a new mode to redefine how What The Car plays, and hopefully push players expectations moving forward.
In Sandstorm, everything is physics-enabled, everything is a vehicle, and everything is constantly on the run. I was responsible for the core concept & design, as well as building out our new features and working with our engineers to keep performance in check.
Among several new systems I created was one which allowed the team to tack wheels onto any new (or existing prop), however mundane, and immediately turn it into a driveable part of the larger "convoy", racing to escape the storm. Houses, trees, rocks, garbage cans… everything must escape.
Everything being a vehicle meant that everything around the player could become a moving-part in a larger setup, and levels could be built with much more dynamic and exciting moments than were previously possible in the base game.
PROJECTILES
Once objects start moving fast enough in a game, they often start to cause problems. I created a lightweight projectile class for What The Car to help smooth over some of those issues, first by implementing some basic squash-stretch animation principles in a flexible & designer-tweakable way.
This soccerball begins its journey as a non-physical projectile, where its arc and impacts are handled “by hand”. Once it collides with the world it graduates to a proper rigidbody, but its visuals are gradually blended out from one state to the other with some numeric springing.
It can still handle subsequent impacts in a way that maintains this springy soft-body feeling, even though from the original point of impact onward, its collision is always a simple sphere throughout.