The Race Game

Today, we are proud to present to you our latest accomplishment: The glorious, the unbelievable, the one and only Race Game!

Well, granted, it’s not the next AAA blockbuster, but: it’s the first game we made using the new version of our Sphere Engine! We put a lot of effort into adding new features to the engine lately. To showcase and test those novelties, we equipped Race Game with a dynamic split-screen feature. Players can join and even leave dynamically. Albeit it being only an engine test game, it is actually quite fun. You can race others in local multiplayer or solo and remember your time, which already makes it quite competitive. And the sort of funky 90s style is a feast for the eyes, don’t you think?

It’s a great thing for us to see that the engine is becoming ready for actually making games with it. After making Sphere Game, Helix Repair and Stellary with our old engine, we decided to develop the new version from the ground up again. We actually learned how Vulkan works while making the first version of the engine. So with our gained knowledge, we made some important decisions before starting the development of the new Sphere Engine:

• Separating the engine into two abstraction layers: The low level abstraction (LLA) and the high level abstraction (HLA). The LLA is now very close to Vulkan itself, only automating cleaning up Vulkan objects using reference counters. The goal of the HLA is to expose an easy-to-use, opinionated abstraction based on the LLA. This separation made it way easier to implement the LLA as it now doesn’t need to be safe anymore. Also, having automated the Vulkan cleanup using the LLA, we were able to fully set the focus of the HLA on providing a neat interface.
• To account for data dependencies between logical units in the HLA, we made a Rust crate dedicated to this exact purpose: Daab. We use Daab heavily in the HLA, especially also for Swapchain recreation. If you’re interested in how Daab works, have a look at this post.

Race Game really is a milestone! The new Sphere Engine is finally making its first steps in the gaming world. This is just the start of the journey towards making our next larger game. Stay tuned!