Overview

Speed of Needs is a singleplayer racing game themed around Need for Speed and Initial D.

You race one other driver on a rainy downhill track at night while most likely copyrighted eurobeat blasts into your ears.
This was my first real game. Not just another early exercise, but the first completed project that actually felt like mine. It even got its own trailer, which I am still very proud of to this day.

Trailer

This trailer is still one of the main reasons this project means so much to me. It was the first time one of my games felt like a complete thing rather than just an exercise.

A rainy downhill duel

This was the first project where we had around two weeks of development time and no real strict guideline for what the final result had to be.

At the time, I was heavily into Initial D and just loved the feeling it had. I am also somewhat of a car guy myself, so the whole idea of old 90s Japanese cars racing downhill at night already had me immediately. I also grew up with the Need for Speed series, so I had at least some internal idea of how something like this should feel.

Even though the assets were not made by me, apart from the user interface, and even though a lot of the game logic started as things grabbed from Stack Overflow and then bent into my own use case, the overall composition still feels very personal to me. That is why I am still extremely proud of it.

How it played

The core loop was very simple.

You start on the line. The enemy driver is in front, you are in the back.
Three, two, one, go.

Then you race downhill. Not much more to it.

Held together by atmosphere

The game takes place on a fictional mountain road somewhere at night, in the rain.

The further down you get, the more foggy it becomes, almost like the atmosphere tightens up the closer you get to the finish line. The world felt relatively large to me at the time. The track itself is around five minutes long, even though of course none of it is particularly realistic.

There are also parts where you can get stuck because of how extreme some of the elevation changes are inside certain corners. So the track definitely had some rough edges.

Still, the foggy night rain race already had something in it that, in hindsight, feels at least a little bit dstwre-ish.

Gameplay trailer

The handling was awful

The handling was honestly kind of garbage.

If you were not used to it, the car just drifted around almost uncontrollably with the rear sliding out all the time, yet somehow it could also flip over if the angle got too sharp. I still do not fully understand how I managed to mess that up that badly.

Visually and presentation-wise though, I think it actually held up much better.

Because of the volumetric fog, the rain, the FOV shifts, and the music volume changing based on speed, it really did feel like you were moving fast. Even if you also knew that there was a good chance you would end up upside down after the next corner.

How it was created

This was built in Unity.

I used EasyRoads3D to create the roads and the standard terrain tools for the terrain itself. Everything else, from the guardrails to the street lamps, was placed by hand. That alone probably took three or four days.

And yes, the street lamps turned off if you crashed into them, which I still is a detail most wont actually notice although it adds alot to the perceived reality inside the game.

Issues that arrived

The driving physics were the first big problem.

I even still have a short clip of myself testing them, and to be honest, they did not get that much better than what ended up in the final version.

The second major issue was just the scale of building the level. Making the road, shaping the terrain, placing objects by hand, trying to make the whole route feel like an actual downhill pass. That was simply a massive amount of work for where I was at the time.

What I learned from it

It is a bit hard to pin down exactly because this was one of those projects where a lot of things happened at once.

More than anything, it was the first time I really built something myself. Not in the sense that every asset or every line of logic was fully original, but in the sense of actually finding solutions, composing a full experience, trying ideas, discarding them again, and shaping something over a longer development window.

That made it feel different from the projects before it.

Remaining material

I still have the project, a testing clip, the trailer, and a gameplay trailer.

Sadly, the project itself is now basically bricked. A few years later I tried remastering it and moving it over to HDRP, but that broke the whole composition. The code is still there, but the actual project is not really in a presentable state anymore.

At some point in the future, I would genuinely like to remake Speed of Needs in Godot. Not necessarily as part of dstwre, at least not yet, though I might still change my mind on that. The game just means a lot to me, and I would love to polish it up properly one day.

The source will most likely not be published publicly. Like with several other early projects, it relies heavily on third-party assets, and I do not feel good about redistributing it without knowing how the original creators would feel about that.