Brackey 2025.2 - Formula Ant

Last month I helped make a silly racing simulation game for the Brackeys Game Jam!

What's up with that?

I helped out with the code-structure, build configuration and the camera system. I also did the post-jam patches and got android support working. I wanted to write a small post mortem on how I helped the project and how I could have helped better. I love game jams and really want to post about them here more often, if I get the chance. This time, the Brackey's game jam theme was Risk it for the biscuit.

The game can be found on this page, on Octostitch's Itch.io!

The Game as it is

Formula Ant is a race-betting simulation game made to run in the browser. It uses the Godot engine and was made in 7 days by a core team of 3 devs. In the game you have a sever debt, which you need to pay off by the end of a 5 day period. To pay off this debt, you must raise an ant and enter them in races to earn big winnings. In it's current state, this is what the game is. The planned concept for the game is much bigger (In traditional game-jam fashion haha-)

The Game as it was intended

Because the intended scope was a bit larger; here are the main systems that didn't make it:

• Ants having a chance to die during a race, moreso if you equip them with something dangerous eg. Uranium
• The race ending with an ant receiving a biscuit, with a different biscuit depending on which race you entered the ant
• A tomogotchi style minigame for inbetween the races. The kinder you are to your ant, the better they race
  • This was intended to work with the ant-death mechanic so you would feel worse for the loss
• Ant equipment being visible in the races`

Aside from those core systems were plans to make the game feel a bit nicer, such as sound effects synced to footsteps, UI sounds and animations, particles for footsteps and confetti for a race well won. I think all things considered, the right part of the game were prioritized and I'm very proud that the game was submitted on time with as much content as there was!

For this jam, the team consisted of:

• Programmer - Octostitch
• Kaine - 2D and UI Artist - portfolio here
• Rachel - 3D Artist - portfolio here
• PorpleFish - Programming support

What I helped with

Race System

This system was programmed by Octostitch, I just helped with the code architecture and planning.

I helped out a bit with getting the ants to complete the race, and tracking the placements for the ants (Who's in first, second etc. etc.) It was an interesting challenge because there should be a bit of randomness so the ants aren't all perfectly following a line, but a week isn't long enough to learn how to do complex path finding. Initially the ants would all follow a spline, but the movement was a bit too rigid and wouldn't be fun to watch without a lot of adjustments.

We ended up on a series of targets on each corner of a track. Each target has a radius, so when an ant needs to go to that corner, it will choose a random point in a circle around the target. The target also knows what the next target an ant should race to is, so we could make a loop that the ants could race around. (I want to implement a list of next-targets, so the ants can diverge their paths and a course could be less linear, but making a complex course like this in the time we had was not feasible!)

Camera System

This is where I spent most of my time!
The camera system is heavyily inspired by the camera uesd for battles in Final Fantasy 7. I wanted the game to feel a bit more interesting to watch than just seeing the ants going around the track from a birds eye view. I've been thinking a lot about the time when developers were really excited to bring games to 3D and wanted to yell "Hey!! this game's 3D! look at the camera moves!!" And would yell this through the games' design.
I noticed how rare 3D submissions are for game-jams I decided to indulge in the same feeling. The rapid camera changes and lack of race-status UI turned a few people away from the game, but there were more positive reviews mentioning this than negative so I think I might just need to tweak things a bit.

The system uses a list of possible camera cuts which are dependant on conditions being met. If a condition is met it adds a camera to the list, if it's not met anymore it will remove the camera, there is a separation between camera and condition here so you can mix and match. At the end of a timer, it will choose one of the camera cuts from the list and swap to it! If the race is just starting, or about to end, I overwrite the camera to show what's going on. The only conditional class I was able to set up was a collider that would keep track of how many ants were in a space, and whether or not the player's ant was there. There were 3 back up cameras in case none of these location based conditions were met; a face camera, third person camera and a quarter view of the entire track.

The one other thing I added to the camera system was camera shake. The camera shake is based on how quickly the ant is going. It's great.

Other super last minute things

• Background ambience and music was added 20 minutes before the submission time
  • They are playing from a source in the middle of the track and are super disorienting with the camera cuts; OOPS!
• Got the game working on Android after the jam, because I wanted to show a friend's kid the game without pulling out a laptop

Notes for next time

For next time I help out in a jam like this; I think I was too anxious about making the game more fun, rather than focusing on making it approachable first. I think if I could redo it, I could start with making sure the plot to the game was understandable just from playing the game; then just focus on getting the UI to show which ant's in what place.

However

Spending time like this would make me forgo most of the camera system and not let us gather the benefits of using 3D for a game. While those would have been the "Right" choices if I wanted to make the game do better, I wouldn't have had my choices imprinted on the game. I think that's part of why game jams are nice, what should I make when there isn't time to make all the right choices? It's a fun position to be

Sorry for such a rambling post. I wanted to practise writing about game jam experiences before the Scream Fest jam I'll be doing in 3 weeks or so. I'll probably have a lot more to talk about then and will have a much harder time editing that post down!