Obstacle Overdrive: How an Indie Studio Created a Toy Car Adventure Game

Introduction

Obstacle Overdrive captures the feel of the RC car hobby. The player drives a remote control car and crawls through a toy-scale world. The goal was to create a cozy, slow, and careful driving experience, not a traditional racing game. Players have to move gently with acceleration and approach obstacles patiently, rather than simply holding down the throttle.

The world itself is built from colorful objects inspired by childhood toys. Tracks are made from childhood toys and household items, creating a playful environment where the obstacles themselves feel imaginative and nostalgic. Obstacle Overdrive is Arcane Ermine's breakout title. There are a bunch of RC hobbyists on the team. During the discussion of what type of game to make, a game that mimicked the RC hobby was proposed and chosen.

The Story of the Game

Obstacle Overdrive is about carefully navigating a toy-scale car through obstacle courses made of everyday objects. The gameplay emphasizes precision and patience rather than speed. It's a cozy game. You see some dramatic flips, but there are checkpoints throughout the courses to place you back on the right path. Players who like cozy games, taking their time, and vibrant visuals. Also, if you're not a fan of driving games, we suggest giving this a try because it's vastly different. It's an ode to real-world RC crawling. 

To understand how the car should behave, the team used a real Axial Gladiator RC crawler in the office as a reference. They would drive it and compare how it handled obstacles to how the in-game car behaved. The team also experimented with real objects by building tracks in the office with thrift-store toys and materials to see which surfaces could be driven over and which ones were too slippery to grip. This hands-on experimentation helped shape how the car handles different materials in the game.

The Physics in the Game

Early in development, the team realized that Unreal Engine's built-in vehicle physics system was designed for real-world cars and real-world gravity, which didn't translate well to a toy-scale RC crawler. They also tried using a plugin, but it made the behavior worse.

Because of this, the team ended up building their own solution on top of the tools that were given. They could rely on the physics and scaling, but it needed heavy customization to get the feel they're going for. To help tune the system, they kept an Axial Gladiator RC crawler in the office and drove it regularly as a reference. By comparing how the real car behaved when climbing obstacles, they could adjust the in-game physics to better match that feeling.

The team also tested different materials in real life. They built small tracks using toys and objects from thrift stores and experimented with how the RC car handled them. For example, they noticed that slick plastic surfaces had very little grip, which helped inform how surfaces behave in the game.

To understand how different surfaces behaved, the team built small obstacle courses in the office using toys and everyday objects. They tested how the RC crawler interacted with different materials, noting which ones had grip and which were too slippery.

They also created a physical track setup that was brought to GDC and Reno Comic Con. One interesting observation was that people often struggled to drive the real RC car but quickly became comfortable controlling the vehicle in the game. New players would initially try to treat it like a racing game, but the intended approach is to move more gently with the acceleration.

The suspension rig was designed to react to gameplay instead of being purely visual. When the tires collide with objects, it moves the tip of the axle, which then controls the spring compression and the movement of the control arms. This setup allows the suspension to respond dynamically to the terrain and obstacles the car drives over.

The Style of the Game

The art direction focused on bright colors and bold shapes inspired by childhood toys. To make environments visually varied without requiring large amounts of manual work, the team created a system where objects can change color depending on where they appear in the world.

Instead of setting colors individually for each object, which would have taken a long time, the system uses the UV faces of the models so that different parts of an object can appear in different colors. This made it much easier to maintain a playful, colorful environment.

Performance Optimization

The engineering team created a custom tool inside Unreal Engine to help optimize scenes. Some levels contain thousands of meshes, and managing them efficiently was important for maintaining performance. The tool helped convert Blueprint setups into meshes and group frequently used objects together.

For example, instead of having one draw call for every individual book in a scene, the system could group them so they render with a single draw call. Reducing the number of draw calls improves frame rate and overall performance.

Conclusion

Lighting was one of the more challenging parts of development. Making small changes required baking the lighting and then checking whether those changes actually improved the scene, which made iteration slower. The lighting artists spent a lot of time refining this process.

Arcane Ermine

Interview conducted by Emma Collins