This is the first game project I have ever done and one of the reasons I learned game development in the first place. I’m a huge fan of the old Tron from 1982, had the old Tron Racing game on my PC and was very pleased with how Tron Legacy looked when it came out. Of course I immediatly thought that this would make for the perfect game. Just the old Tron game but in 3D and with that Tron Legac art style.
Back in the day it took me a while to find Unity. I actually started with XNA on some prototypes, then decided to create my own engine in C# with some DirectX Wrapper (which failed spectaculously) and after months of struggle finally found and settled with Unity. After doing some tutorials on basic stuff here and there I decided it’s time to make a real game. I didn’t have any idea but the Tron idea seemed simple enough. Make like 3 models for the bikes, procdurally create the wall and add a few spicy effects. But with zero knowledge even that can be a huge deal.
In the end I failed at creating a good motorcycle controller. It just kept falling over. And as a funny side note: Only recently, after 7 years, I accidentally stumbled upon a fix with a comment from someone else who also waited 7 years to find a random solution to this problem. Keyword: “upright torgue”.
What has actually held me back over the years in releasing this, allthough this would be the perfect mini project, is the hell that is licensing rights. I can’t just publish it here, without risking a lawsuit or I need to go through the whole process of making it an officially licensed game. Third option would be to alter the design to not trigger copyright. But that’s kind of hard when your whole point is to make a Tron game.
Who knows, maybe I’ll make a clone with cubic bikes one day.
