This week, our team made significant progress across gameplay, art, UI, and VFX as we prepare for upcoming playtests at ETC and South Fayette. With the soft opening approaching, our focus was on polishing the experience, finalizing core systems, and ensuring the third team is fully supported throughout the game.
Gameplay & Systems
We continued strengthening the core game loop by fully integrating the third team into gameplay. The final leaderboard UI—showing rankings, fastest driver, best crowd, and team results—was completed and implemented. Audience behavior and energy interactions were further refined, including adjustments to energy gain when the ball reaches a car and updates to the audience seating layout to support the new team.
We also prepared for multiple playtests by scheduling sessions with middle schoolers, ETC faculty, and at South Fayette. These upcoming sessions will help us validate the new systems and gather feedback for our final polishing phase.
Art & Environment
A large portion of this week was dedicated to polishing the environment. Scene lighting, skybox, materials, and asset placement were all refined to achieve a more cohesive look. Several new 3D models were created and added to the environment, and a near-final asset list was developed to guide upcoming art tasks.
Textures received notable updates, including new materials for audience seats and wheel textures. Additional track details—logos, markings, and visual wear—were added to improve believability. Work also continued on character visuals, including new shaders and VFX-related art prep.
The onboarding storyboard is moving toward completion, with refined sketches and an updated plan for the introductory video.
VFX
VFX development focused on supporting the third team and enhancing gameplay clarity. Major updates were made to energy-related effects including the energy ball, flame jet, glow sticks, and halo effects. Iterations on the third character’s halo VFX continued, with plans to integrate rotation-based behavior and particle elements.
Brightness and visibility were also evaluated during in-scene testing—especially around the audience seating area—to ensure players can clearly read energy and cheering states during gameplay.
Programming & UI
System-side updates included full integration of the third team into UI and gameplay logic. The final leaderboard UI was designed, implemented, and tested. The mobile controller interface for all teams received additional visual updates for clarity and consistency.
Shader development continued, with work on character shaders and flag motion shaders. Some technical challenges arose—especially with certain shader graphs only rendering correctly on specific meshes—but addressing these issues will be a focus for next week.