In a car game, the most fundamental core component is the driving physics — player is driving a car in most if not all of the gameplay. I strongly believe a good driving physics/feeling is crucial in order for any car game to keep players engaged and interested in it. Therefore, the first thing I did was to find a desirable driving physics that is close enough to what I like, then I can "take it from there" — modify it to my liking and start developing the game on it.

Since I'm developing in Unity, I went to sites such as the Unity Asset Store, YouTube, Reddit to search for driving physics assets, and have looked at more than 20 different driving physics assets such as Edy’s Vehicle Physics, Realistic Car Controller, Universal Vehicle Controller, NWH Vehicle Physics 2, Motorsports Dynamics Engine (MoDyEn) and evaluated each of them by trying the driving in their demo.

Eventually, I went for Randomation Vehicle Physics (RVP), an open source vehicle physics package for Unity by JustInvoke, because I like its dynamic arcade-style driving feeling (it can even drift), and its wide range of vehicle type available, also open source (free).

• RVP Initial - built directly upon importing to Unity project, before any editing.

• RVP Edit - with my modifications, mainly on controls remapping, handling tuning and camera adjustment ("Car Taxi" is my edited version of "Car RWD")

Having established the driving basis, the next topic I looked into was how to do multiplayer connection (next post).