Personal Project ¡¤ Work in Progress
Podracer
Prototype
Building a fully custom physics-based vehicle controller from scratch in Unreal Engine 5.
Project Overview
Built on Physics
This prototype started with a simple goal: recreate a vehicle controller that approaches the distinctive feeling of Star Wars Episode I: Racer, while building the entire system myself from scratch in Blueprint.
Rather than relying on Unreal Engine's built-in vehicle systems, the Pod uses custom physics, forces and constraints to drive its behaviour. There are no pre-authored movement animations: the motion of the vehicle and its different components emerges from the simulation.
The project is also an opportunity to deepen my technical understanding of Unreal Engine while approaching the controller as a design problem: defining how the vehicle accelerates, reacts, stabilizes and communicates speed to the player.
Vehicle Design
Designing the Feel
One of the main challenges is finding the balance between physically simulated behaviour and a controller that remains readable and enjoyable to drive.
The Pod's handling is therefore designed through the interaction of custom forces and constraints rather than through predefined animations. This makes behaviours such as inertia, stabilization and the movement of the engines part of the actual simulation, while still allowing the controller to be tuned around the intended player experience.
Blueprint & Physics
Custom vehicle system
I built the vehicle controller and the supporting gameplay systems entirely in Blueprint. The work covers the Pod's custom physics behaviour as well as the systems needed to control, tune and test the vehicle.
Creating the controller without a ready-made vehicle framework has made the prototype a useful technical playground: each behaviour can be isolated, iterated on and adjusted according to the desired driving feel rather than inherited from a conventional wheeled-vehicle solution.
Current Prototype
Gameplay
The current build already includes a functional Pod and a basic gameplay framework. The project is still firmly in prototype territory, with the focus currently placed on refining the controller before expanding the experience around it.
The next stage is to build more of the game around the controller: AI opponents, several levels and a more developed gameplay framework.
Once the vehicle behaviour is sufficiently established, the project will increasingly become a level design exercise as well, with race tracks and spaces designed specifically around the Pod's speed, inertia and movement possibilities.
