c o l i n m c.n a m e/e

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Drifto is a mobile arcade racing game created by Jonathan Howe, it is available for free on the app store and the google play store and has over 1 million downloads.
I was tasked with creating 4 new levels for the game

The game constructs infinite levels by randomly combining together level tiles. If you’re curious how that system works you can watch this video:

Tokyo Level Design Dive

Instead of being on a grid, Tokyo streets are on hundreds of slightly offset grids, creating many “awkward” intersections.

With this in mind I began by modeling the roads.
In Canyon, the first level I made for the game, I made the mistake of making pieces too long and complex. The interesting part of the road generation algorithm isn’t the pieces themselves, it’s the near infinite possible combinations of pieces you can get. So for Tokyo I focused on making the pieces shorter and giving them lots of interesting possible configurations.

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For texturing the roads I created a “trim sheet” texture with all the road elements I needed and then mapped them onto specific parts of the road. This made it easy to reuse elements and keep texture size down.

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For the buildings and environment assets I leaned into a retro-neon vibe which is commonly associated with Drifting because of the Japanese street racing manga Initial D.

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Then I imported everything into Unity and assembled the assets into road tiles.