Grab your buddies and get to the safe house before the cops catch up!
Drive, smash, and drift from point to point, picking up your buddies from robberies and dropping them off at safe houses in exchange for a well-earned tip. As you drive in this game, you’ll build up multipliers, your cash stash… and the number of cops chasing you! Highway Heist was inspired by a mobile video game I played when I was younger, Pako 2.
This prototype game was created by me in three months in my introduction to Unreal 5 Engine class, utilizing Unreal’s built-in car controller and an asset pack. These allowed me to focus on the peripheral game functions of an otherwise ambitious project, considering my experience level at the time.
The development of this game project can be largely broken up into three parts:
The minimap was one of my main focuses during the middle course of the development. Simply slapping another camera in the scene to render the world in a top-down format devastated performance. After following a related tutorial (however imperfect it was…) I utilized a 2D texture of the map, simple sprites, and clever vector math to create a highly performant and responsive minimap as a UI widget. Additionally, a feature I am particularly proud of was a custom spline tool that let me place roads in pleasant curves and elevations. I was even able to use this tool for things like fences, bridges, and telegraph poles!
Throughout the development process, I spent my spare time creating the world the game would take place in. I made sure to utilize Unreal’s existing landscaping and foliage placement tools and an Asset Pack to accelerate my iteration time, and strove to create a realistic town that still “played” well. I cleverly constrained gameplay area with foliage and believable asset placement, and ensured all streets, corners, and alleys offered easy play for casual players and rewarding experiences for skilled ones.
Screencaps showing my custom spline tool in action as a bridge, foliage reacting to my performance-boosting culling and LOD limits, (secondary LOD boxes visible in distance) and animating the heist members!
