Assoluto Racing was released in 2018, before I joined the company. However, the game continues to see great success, with over 20 million downloads as of 2022. Much of that success can be attributed to continued support and consistent content updates in the form of new cars and tracks.
I had the privilege to contribute to several new features.
Level Streaming
One of my first challenges was taking our newest track Aoyama Touge, a large moutain climb dense with a diverse range of high-fidelity assets, and ensuring it could run on lower-end devices with strict memory restrictions. Occlusion culling didn’t cut it; assets had to be constantly unloaded to make room for other track content. The solution was to chop the track into multiple scenes based on shared content, and then load and unload those scene chunks at strategic locations where the player wouldn’t notice. I introduced asynchronous programming into the game for the first time, which allowed me to seamlessly load these scenes in the background.
| Aoyama Touge | |
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Menus and UI Overhaul
We lacked a proper UI designer, so I took it upon myself to design new menus and freshen up old ones when necessary. The Garage, where the player can see his list of owned cars, was overhauled as part of a larger feature update. I shrunk the header and streamlined the car buttons and details.
| Garage Before | Garage After |
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I also worked closely with our in-house artist to create an entirely new screen for our Rentals feature, which lets subscribers use a selected premium car for a limited amount of time. This screen was meant to showcase the currently selected car, and give it an air of luxury.
| New Rental Screen | |
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Game Events
Before I joined the team, Assoluto supported a couple of hard-coded rotating challenges with a limited number of settings changeable from the server. The game designer wanted greater flexibility to create new events with a much wider range of game types, rulesets, and customization.
I wrote a new Events system from the ground up, while simultaneously refactoring large parts of the game to be more modular. From the server, a designer could define the game type, track, available cars, special rules, and even point to special game assets that could be placed over the map. The system ended up being so flexible, the designer used it to extend the gameplay far beyond what we’d been able to do before. From obstacle courses to something similar to Rocket League, my Events system extended the life of the game and gave other developers the platform to experiment with new ideas.
And More
I contributed to a number of more behind-the-scenes features as well. For example, I implemented a “Car Storage” function to let users archive cars they weren’t using. I also worked on a number of developer tools to help streamline communication with our backend. This allowed us to run tournaments and other special events with players from around the world with ease.