Higher Creative Thinking - Night Rally EX
For my second Higher Creative Thinking project the brief came from Adidas. The challenge was to design a new sport or game that would get more 11 to 18 year olds doing sport/exercise. After going through the research section I kept coming back to cars. I'd been deep into Forza Horizon 5 at the time, spending hours tuning setups and figuring out what each change actually did and I wanted to do something that scratched that itch.
My concept became JDM Rallycross, a mixed surface racing sport built entirely around Japanese Domestic Market cars. The scoring rewards drifting, airtime and car control alongside finishing position so new drivers can still earn points without just being the fastest. To communicate it I built an actual game in Godot 4 called Night Rally EX featuring a drivable version of the track I designed. Three real JDM car replicas and a fully working checkpoint/split system.
This project pushed me to connect a lot of things I don't normally combine in one place: sport design, branding, Blender modelling, Godot development, and DaVinci Resolve editing. It was one of those projects where I wanted to keep going past the brief because I kept thinking of things to add.
JDM Rallycross is a five lap mixed surface race on a circuit combining dirt, gravel, tarmac and a street sections with at least one drift zone and one jump. Only JDM cars are allowed, split into Classic and Modern classes. Scoring combines finishing position with style points for clean drifts, airtime and car control so drivers who don't finish first can still get points. 8 to 12 drivers per race with heats, semis and a final.
The game was built in Godot 4 using the built in Godot VehicleBody3D physics. I stripped down a multiplayer car controller I'd made before to just the driving mechanics and tuned three cars to match their real life counterparts: Toyota AE86, Mazda RX-7 and Toyota MR2 Mk2. The track was modelled in Blender with per section physics materials so the car reacts differently on gravel versus tarmac. On top of that I added a checkpoint split system, a speedometer with live RPM and gear, a day/night cycle using a sky shader from godotshaders.com and a music player that reads MP3 metadata and displays the cover art on a popup in the corner of the screen.
I recorded myself presenting the project in front of my green screen, chroma keyed the footage and then imported it into Godot 4 where I placed it on a plane inside one of the cars. I drove the track a few times with OBS recording the in car view so the whole presentation plays out from inside a moving AE86. I then edited it together in DaVinci Resolve.