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Light Riders was the game that I created for Mini Jam 58: Neon, with a limitation of Money being a core mechanic. I had the pleasure of working with another small team this time around, a Composer and a Programmer.

I greatly enjoyed working with the “Neon” theme for this game jam and had a ton of fun building the materials and decals for the level. We also implemented Money as a mechanic (not really a core mechanic in this case but we did what we could) by having an in game currency that allowed players to purchase upgrades for their bikes which is a feature that I loved building out in UE4.

The 2 games that were a major influence for us on this project were Tron and Road Rash. We knew that Tron’s visuals combined with the fast moving combat of Road Rash could be an amazingly fun concept and we wanted to see if we could put our own unique spin on them by implementing an upgrade system that could be accessed quickly without leaving the race or opening a menu.

For upgrades we had Health Up, Speed Increase, Damage Increase, Armor Up, Handling Up and a Bounty. Purchasing the bounty allowed the player to have snipers target the enemy racers from the rooftops of buildings along the track and take shots at them as they went by. This was such a last minute add that we almost didn’t get it into the game but it really adds some flavor to the races.

If I were to do it again or make additional levels in the future I would build a tool to be able to place the decals more easily. I had to manually place over 400 individual decals because of how they needed to turn with the curves of the map and dip/raise with the hills. Placing the enormous number of buildings was also a bit of a pain point with them being different sizes and having to be spread out from each other a bit. I did try to use the foliage tool to place them but it didn’t work well with the static meshes I had for the buildings.

This is one of my favorite game jam projects that I’ve worked on, and I learned a ton from working on it. Please feel free to check it out on my itch.io page: https://hexnite.itch.io/lightriders

Or you can download it directly from here: https://sethrolfe.com/wp-content/uploads/LightRiders.zip