Project Nitro

racing game in Godot

About the Project

Project Nitro is a prototype I made at the end of 2023 in a two month period, while also balancing my university assignments. I made it to figure out how realistically make a racing game, as well as to study the possibility of making an actual game out of it.

Features

  • Kart-style arcade driving physics with focus on drifts and boosts
  • Three cars with different driving feel
  • Record times for each track are saved locally

Development Tools

The prototype was made in Godot, powered by the Godot-Jolt plugin. Car models were made by Ash Dev, and all other assets are sourced from Kenney’s massive free asset catalog.

Project Details

Challenges and Solutions

While I thoroughly enjoy working with Godot, there are still some issues with both physics and graphics that are hard to ignore. Project Nitro’s vehicle simulation has plenty of workarounds for bugs in the engine that I’m not quite as qualified to fix and fork the source myself.

I also found prototyping difficult without doing the suggested workflow of modelling in Blender first, then exporting to Godot, instead of using the engine’s CSG nodes. I did it anyway as I’m not a Blender expert by any means and with my low free-time it would take me a month to make a handful of tracks.

Future Plans

I had the game tested by friends and colleagues and they really enjoyed the controls, even if there wasn’t a lot to show off.

In the near future I want to either retrofit Project Nitro into a simple driving game, or do some R&D on driver AI and make a small scale racing game with some semblance of progression.


There are three different cars to test.

Download

You can find Project Nitro in my Itch.io page.