Driverse

Inspiration

As young adults who have recently obtained a license and currently in the process of applying for one, we observed that obtaining a driver's license is seen as a rite-of-passage by individuals of all ages. However, it's important to note that accidents on the road and other driving-related incidents are one of the leading cause of premature death around the world. Driverse evolved from our goal to build an application that would enhance the driver's education process by making it more engaging and thus improve information and skill retention, building better and safer drivers.

What it does

Driverse is a simple 2D obstacle-avoidance game meant to stimulate driving in a very simplified way. Users direct a car driving along a 2-lane divided road to safely avoid common obstacles (ie. pedestrians) and respond to road conditions and traffic signs.

How we built it

We used Godot as our game engine for its ease of use, open source nature, robust graphics support, and availability of online learning resources. We created the major components as separate scenes, divided among all members of the team, then came together to assemble all the parts and unify animations. We designed our background graphics and car animations on Figma, and found Creative Commons licensed assets for the other graphics (pedestrians and traffic signs). For the background, to imitate an infinite road for the car (directed by user) to drive along, we used vertical parallax scrolling. Simple animations stimulate movement in pedestrians and the car to make the game more interactive. To code movement and allow user interaction with the game, we used Godot's built-in gd script.

Challenges we ran into

In order to create a vertical parallax scroll effect, we instantiated the background road as a game Sprite, instead of textural background. This introduced complications into the viewport, as there is no way to automatically size a sprite to fill the viewport. It took us a long period of trial and error to manually scale the background to fill the whole viewport, which also limited the area of "driving space" for the user as well, as some of the road got cut off.

Additionally, we hoped to spawn pedestrians and obstacles at timed intervals throughout the game, however this process took much longer than we anticipated. We had trouble getting the pedestrians to appear at first, and even in our final iteration only one pedestrian appears. As such, we had to cut a lot of functionality we planned to have in our game due to the limited time.

Finally, to preserve the birds eye view perspective of the game, we chose not to account for gravity, which changes the physics of object interactions in the game.

What we learned & what we're proud of

This was the very first video game we ever built -- a few days ago, none of us even knew what Godot, or a video game engine really was. As complete novices to video game design, we're really proud of all the work we put in to learning 2d game design in such a short period of time, especially in creating adorable animations for our project.

What's next for Driverse

After LA Hacks, we want to keep working on Driverse. Our game, while a functional MVP is very scant and not what we would consider to be a playable game. We want to fix and improve existing features: spawning pedestrians that cross the street regularly, improving the parallax scroll. And then we want to add more challenges: traffic signs and lights, and test for user responses to them and show message callouts.

Built With

• godot