Released: August 2019
Platforms: iOS, Android

'Super 23 Racing Mobile' is a mobile top down racing game, with 3 game modes (Time Trial, Arcade and Championship), 14 vehicles and 9 tracks. The tracks in Time Trial and Arcade require unlocking before being able to race them, the player unlocks a track by watching a reward ad. Once a track has been unlocked it can be played as many times as the player wishes, this means after all tracks have been unlocked there are no more ads present in the game. All 3 championships are available straight away.

Time Trial — race around a track as fast as possible, the player has 3 laps to get their fastest lap — which is then shared on the leaderboards.

Arcade — race against 7 AI vehicles to learn the tracks and have an extra challenge.

Championship — compete against 7 AI vehicles, across 3 tracks to be crowned the winner of the championship.

After successfully completing Match 3 Classic in about 2 weeks, I challenged myself to do another game in a short time frame, over the Christmas 2018 holiday period. Using a racing game template I wanted to get this done quickly as a small project, unfortunately, due to a rather poor game template and over ambitious scope for the time period, it ended up not being released until August 2019.

As it turned out, the game template was far too interconnected within itself, make it difficult to customise beyond a reskin — the UI done in a poor way — the devs created it in a way meaning only the images should be swapped out, which required big changes to allow for an improved look and feel. The UI and code relies on text searches, which lead to me (unknowingly) breaking functionality and then wasting time on hunting down the cause of the break. The code is also a mess, some classes being approx 1,000 lines of code, using repeated code… string searches…

On the bright side, the experience of making this game has vastly improved my trouble shooting skills, and given me insight in how not to do things and what bad code looks like — I shall endeavour to make my code clean, readable, modular and easy to extend.

S23R Mobile used the Light Weight Render Pipeline (LRPW), which wass new to me and was interesting to learn the basics of with this project. I also learnt the basics of light baking, how to setup a scene for a light bake and how to get good results. The two of these combined, along with post processing, has resulted in a good looking mobile game.

Many of the assets used are no longer available, a link is provided where possible.
The main plugins utilised in Super 23 Racing Mobile are:

Simple Racer — Cartoon Assets Link — The in game art used for this game was a pack from Synty Studios, I love their work and am pleased to have made a good looking game with this pack.

Polygon Nature Pack Link — Another Synty pack, this was used to for a few environment assets to flesh out the set dressing.

Easy Achievements and Leaderboards — I always like to add achievements and leaderboards in my games, using this plugin from Gley made it very easy to add and is a plugin I’d recommend to others developing for mobile.