My Process

Track Drifter was Team Drifters’ most narrative-centric project, and the game was designed to focus more on story elements than gameplay, though this wasn’t always the case. The game was originally planned to be a 3D title focused on spectacle and collision physics until we recognized such a design would clash with the story we wanted to tell. The whole game pivoted to a visual-novel-esque format afterwards that I directed, only holding on to the branching decisions and the two passengers debating over player decisions.

I designed and implemented a majority of the game, along with directing its simplistic visual style. One of my biggest challenges was timing and ordering the dialogue of each scene, using a pair of lists and a coroutine to display dialogue and specify the speaker. Another challenging part of development for me was balancing the ease of implementation for other designers while making sure the quality of the game didn’t suffer. The repeating tracks spawning was timed just right in order to make the scene transitions appear seamless, and each major block of dialogue and choice was organized into its own scene to make development easier. This meant I could also use a scene template that each scene could always start from as a base.