Deadpedal (Faycrest Studios)

  Deadpedal is a fast-paced 3D arcade-style combat racing game. You race against AI in single player or against your friends and strangers in online multiplayer. Pickup powerups and sabotage your opponents, while you race on various tracks. Players can choose between twelve racers, hailing from around the world, who are invited to compete in an underground racing series with one goal in mind, to win.

  While Deadpedal has been in development for many years, my tenure on the game started in September of 2023 and has continued to the present day. We are currently a team of 15 developers and have varied in size over the time of the game's development. We plan to release on steam in late 2025.

  For my programming test when I was first recruited to the studio, I was handed a vehicle system and an AI system and told to make them function together. Since then, everything the team and I have done with the cars has been built around the marriage of the two systems. I have worked on adding support for the various power ups, overhauling the camera, adjusting the car's gravity, max speed, acceleration, suspension, and more.

  Deadpedal is a complicated game and continues to go through various iterations on how we want it to feel when the players are racing around the various tracks. After a demo build went out internally, I was tasked with overhauling the existing player camera setup to better convey speed and to implement camera drag based on the strength of the car's acceleration, this being seen primarily with the Speed Boost powerup and Boost Pads.

  After the departure of a fellow programmer from the team, I inherited responsibility for the powerups. At the time there was only a template, a manager component for the player, two power ups in a prototyped state. Since I took over, I expanded the total to 7 power ups and have continued to update the manager to expand its ability to interact with other systems such as the HUD and the player camera, for when the player uses a Speed Boost to increase their acceleration to effect camera drag. The current power ups include: Speed Boost, Homing Missile, Shockwave, Shield, Smokescreen, and more.

  A unique elements of Deadpedal is that each track comes with an Environmental Hazard, such as the volcanic eruption on the tropical island track or the explosion of an old gas station on our western usa desert track. In the game, these take the form of power ups that players can pickup, unlike regular powerups they alter the track and serve as a potential hazard to every player. These have been a fun challenge as they need to work within the powerup structure but effect systems outside of the manager I've had to work closely with artists for both Powerups and Environmental Hazards, mainly the VFX team, to ensure smooth implementation of their assets and that it we have a unified vision of how these systems function.

  One of my recurring roles has been working with the UI team to add / iterate on the functionality for the UI as well as to help plan potential systems to support the UI, such as how to distinguish between input from Playstation and Xbox controllers. We ended up putting this on hold in favor of a general check for Mouse and Keyboard vs Gamepad, and having the option to toggle Xbox or Playstation specific UI in the settings menu. While working on the UI, I've developed data structures to help manage the data being passed to the UI with the first one being for the leaderboard. The leaderboard structure has allowed me to focus what data is passed over to the UI code while being easily expandable whenever the team decides to change what information to display.