Hi! My name is Brennan Anderson, and I am the founder of Whatnot Games and developer of Star Racer. I started in game dev as a composer and technical sound designer, and worked in AAA for the last 12 years before making the jump to indie this year.
Star Racer is an anti-gravity racer with pixel art vehicles and environments. It combines ideas from a lot of places, but the main inspirations are the original F-Zero and Star Fox.
F-Zero on the SNES is one of my all time favorite games, and I’ve always wanted it to have multiplayer. So when thinking about games I thought I could make, a local-multiplayer F-Zero came to mind. I had also been playing a lot of Star Fox 64 at the time, so adding flight felt like a natural evolution.
As the game progressed, I also drew inspiration from Smash Bros. Melee, and Mario Maker with the event race challenges and course editor respectively as a great way to offer more challenge and creativity to players.
I must have tapped into something in the zeitgeist, because about 4 months after I began development, Nintendo shadow dropped F-Zero 99! I had several mixed emotions about this, but ultimately it inspired me to push myself to make the game as fun as possible. I began the project working completely solo, but quickly realized I needed help to make it into what it is today. I have had several other engineers join the project at various points to help round out my knowledge and ability to develop the game. At the time, I was also fully employed at a AAA studio, so splitting my time between that and my own game started to become extremely stressful. Eventually I made the decision to leave my job and focus full time on Indie development. The progress before I left was slow and steady, but it accelerated exponentially once it was my sole focus.
I used the Unity game engine. I have been using Unity for at least 15 years, so I had a pretty good understanding of the engine. There really was not much consideration to other engines when starting the project. I’ve used Unreal during my AAA development as well, but I am not as big a fan of it over Unity, especially for smaller scale projects. I’m just more comfortable in Unity and am able to work faster, so it was a much better fit.
There have been many technical issues from bugs to performance, to deciding on and creating frameworks and having to remake them at various points. These types of things will always happen in complex projects, but they never felt insurmountable. Really the biggest hurdle was dealing with burnout. Burning the candle at both ends caused a litany of physical and medical issues I had to deal with. One of the hardest was energy and temperament. Anybody who has dealt with burnout knows that as your energy goes down, your passion doesn’t. You push yourself to do what you are passionate about, even to the detriment of other things. Doing this can put you in a pretty terrible mental state when you have to deal with anything other than your passion. Unfortunately, life has a way of forcing you to deal with many other things that are equally, if not more important. I’ve done a lot of work to try and balance and restore my energy. Once this game is released, I plan on taking a long vacation!
Take care of yourself. Drink water. Exercise. Take breaks. GO OUTSIDE! I cannot overstate how important doing these things are. I am still not the best at these things, but whenever I take the time to listen to what my body needs, my mental state improves tenfold. You really need to find a way to make this life sustainable, because it can become extremely unsustainable very fast without you even realizing it.
Making games is extremely rewarding, and it is a worthwhile pursuit for anybody who is creative, who wants to make fun experiences, who wants to create art. Everybody should give it a try! At the same time it can be incredibly demanding and mentally taxing. So please listen to your body and work in collaboration with it so that you can keep doing it for as long as possible.
Star Racer was a labor of love to make as fun of an anti-grav racer as I could. I can say many things about it, but I think the game will speak for itself. We have a demo for the game that should give you a good idea of what you will be getting into, and the full game is so much fun. Please consider checking it out!
Brennan
