Drive Time Radio

Drive Time Radio is a 1st person Horror/Comedy game, released in December of 2021. 

It was a passion project of mine, born from my love of horror, my own comedic sensibilities, and my curiosity to experiment with Unreal Engine. I was the sole developer on the game, building it from the ground up in Unreal Engine and working on all aspects of the project, from inception to delivery.

Drive Time Radio began as an experiment. I wanted to see if I could make an infinite road for a car to drive on, as cheaply (performance) as possible. This experiment took many forms. An early idea was to have the car stationary, and instead of the car moving, the surroundings would simply pan past on an infinite loop. Another idea was to have the environment on a spline, and rather than turning the car, player input would affect the tangent of the spline, thus turning the road instead.

Eventually, I found a solution I could be happy with. A straight road, comprised of about a dozen "Chunks" of road. As the car moved, the chunks at the back would teleport to the front once out of sight. To assist with performance, the chunks made heavy use of Instanced Static Meshes, and other optimisation techniques. But finally, I had an infinite road solution I was satisfied with.

The project might have ended there, but as I had been working on my prototypes, a narrative had begun to take shape in my mind. So, I started writing a high - level overview of the game, what it was and what it could be. During this stage I named the Characters, and established the dynamic that they would carry for the rest of the production, as well as nailing done the basic plot and events.

From here, I then fleshed out the loose script I had written into clearly defined "Beats" of content. The purpose of this stage was to replicate on paper how I anticipated I would implement the content into game. Each "Beat" would have to be it's own Sequence in Unreal Engine, and logic would be required to tell each Sequence when to play. I also needed a space to easily explore the branching narrative elements of the game, how player choice or action can lead to an event, or preclude another. Twine seemed ideal for this, and during the next phase of writing, I utilised it heavily. 

At the same time, I was still inside Unreal Engine, building the systems of the game. I knew I would need to be able to trigger interactive sequences that had a variety of outcomes based on player input. I knew I would need to trigger external events or changes in the world. I knew I would need to trigger asynchronous events parallel to the core flow. These are all things that Unreal Engine does not easily do right out of the box, so I set about making functions and blueprints to allow me to do these things.

I didn't want to have to script unique logic for every single thing that could ever happen in the game, so I designed by blueprints systemically. I thought about common functions, shared behaviour, parameters, and made sure that any functions or blueprints I made were robust enough to take those into account. While ofcourse bespoke events do occur, I'm proud of the amount of behaviour I was able to instantiate.

A large part of the game was interaction with in-world UI Elements, to answer questions from the radio hosts. I experimented with a few different designs before landing on one I was happy with. It was important for me that the interaction was simple and intuitive, so I opted for a minimalist design. I integrated the UI into my aforementioned scripting system, so that the narrative could respond to the choices the player makes. 

My design ethos here was to balance two priorities. The user experience of the player interacting with the UI, balanced with it not distracting too much from the driving gameplay. My vision for the final mechanic was for the player to be dodging and weaving between fast paced obstacles, all while having the bandwidth to answer questions too. If one made the other more difficult, that was good! I wanted the player to feel like they were juggling two complex tasks in a frantic and high paced situation. But if one prevented the other, then the design was falling short of my intentions. The game fluctuates between this formula, balancing questions and obstacles to make gameplay that feels action - packed without being too frustratingly difficult.

As the game came together, I started implementing the narrative content. I first did a rough pass of all the dialogue using Text-To-Speech. I like to get content playable ASAP, as that's when I feel I can make the most accurate assessment of quality, with a controller in my hands. I did a first pass implementation of the game, using Text - To - Speech and placeholder assets, and from there I was able to make decisions about content. Playing this early version, I was able to cut, rewrite, or even add content based on what I felt the game needed to be elevated. Next, I recorded all the dialogue for the game using these updated scripts. I voiced both characters, and used Adobe Audition to help make them sound distinct without sounding artificial. I did a majority of the editing and mixing for the dialogue in Adobe Audition, exporting final tracks to Unreal Engine when satisfied. One of the many systems I created for Drive Time Radio was a subtitles system, as I was unhappy with the vanilla Unreal Engine subtitles support, and believed it did not meet my needs. I created the system and ensured it could be keyed from a Sequence.

The game continued to evolve from there. I refined the visual elements, worked on pacing and plotting, and implemented many frontend systems such as a main menu and pause menu. I started testing the game with friends and colleagues, trying to determine what could be done to elevate the game further. During this process, I cut around 1/5th of the game. The final product is tighter and more focused as a result. After my round of iteration and testing, I polished the game for weeks, fine-tuning every detail to best avoid glitches, bugs, and crashes. I put together a trailer for the game, using rendering and editing lessons i'd learned while working on the trailer for The Dark Pictures Anthology: The Devil in Me.

The game released to great success, finding an audience on Itch.io. As of Feburary 2024, reaching almost 28,000 downloads.

It exploded on Youtube as well, becoming popular with content creators such as Markiplier, The Game Grumps, and Game Theory. The game gained millions of views across hundreds of creators.