remenant Games

Micro Machines Remake - GameMaker Project

The second assignment of the year was to recreate a game from “The Golden Age” of gaming, using the GameMaker platform. The time of the Playstation, N64, Atari, Dreamcast and SNES. Consoles everywhere.

My assigned game was the original Micro Machines, a top down racer for 4 players. When I first requested the game I thought it was going to be a relatively easy task, but the project soon threw up some interesting curve balls. The first task was to get player movement up and running, as well as parralax scrolling to emulate the floor moving at a different speed to the table.

After that, it took a fair bit of research to try and get an idea of how to emulate the original. The controls needed to be accurate but overall needed to have “drifty” feel. There needed to be solid obstacles as well as non-solids which affected the player in some way. There also needed to be a checkpoint system to track where the cars were on track, and to prevent them from taking short cuts other than those intended.

It took about two weeks to get the game to the state below, which I presented in front of a board of judges. Although most of the main functionality is in the game, there are a few niggling problems that I never fully managed to implement, partly due to the restrictions of the platform. The race position system was never fully implemented, and the collision detection is non-existant between cars, and questionable at times with stationary objects.