CART LIFE

Nowhere is the creative tension between classic and modern design techniques more apparent than in Playtonic’s approach to the game’s minecart runs. The tracks use a plugin from the Unity store, conceived primarily for racing games, but it’s intuitive and flexible enough to create sprawling tracks that wind around an entire world. Senior engineer Simon Gerges has been balancing an arcade-like feel with a simulation-led approach. “I’ve been pulling it more towards

Trials,” he says. Price, meanwhile, has been pushing it in another direction. “Simon’s like a physicist and I’m trying to do a bad Miyamoto impression. I mean, he wouldn’t mind whether air drag was this value or that value, would he?” The two have found a happy medium, using a variety of under-the-hood tweaks to control speed, braking and momentum. “It’s been a nice evolutionary process,” Price adds. “It really embraces our mentality of not bothering to define [a mechanic] exactly and write it down in a design doc. We’d rather go by feel.”