What we set out to prove
A top-down kart racer built around drift, not top speed - junkyard karts, tight tracks, and weapons nobody asked for but everybody uses.
What made it hard
Top-down driving has a physics problem most racers never solve cleanly: without the depth cues a behind-the-car camera gives you, drift can feel either weightless (the kart slides like it's on ice with no sense of grip) or unresponsive (it fights the player's input so hard that drifting feels like a penalty instead of the point). We wanted drift to be the fun part, not a mechanic players tolerate to reach the next straight.
How we solved it
We built the handling model around a single tunable value - "grip loss" - that controls how sharply a kart breaks traction on a drift input, then spent most of prototyping just driving in circles until it felt right, before touching track design at all. Weapons came second and stayed deliberately chaotic: a magnet that yanks nearby karts sideways mid-drift, a scrap-pile hazard that launches on contact, a smoke cloud that blinds anyone tailing you. None of them are "fair" in the traditional sense - they're built to create the kind of last-corner chaos that makes a run memorable even when you lose. Tracks were designed drift-first too: every corner was tuned so the "correct" line is also the most satisfying slide, not a separate, boring optimal path.
What shipped
Scrapyard Drift's core loop tested well specifically on replay rate - playtesters kept re-running the same track immediately after finishing, chasing a cleaner drift chain rather than a better time. It's also our first game running the same handling model across mobile touch controls and PC gamepad input without a compromised version on either side.
UnityC#Custom drift/grip physics modelTop-down camera and track tooling
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