James MarlandTechnical Artist - Tools, Pipelines & Shaders

June 2025

Borderline Racing

Rookies 2025 Game of the Year finalist. I produced this 11-person Borderlands racer and built its outline shader, VFX and more.

A cel shaded city street under an orange haze, black outlines on every surface, a curving overpass in front of tiered cooling towers lit with green bands, stacked shipping containers, graffiti and a vertical neon BAR sign

Breakdowns

5 deep dives into the parts I built.

  1. A Lectra City street with the outline's debug colours on, nearby edges in red and orange, distant towers in green
    01Outline shader and VFXI recreated the iconic ink outline with a post-process as well as every VFX in the game.
  2. Patches of grass, dirt and pebbles vertex painted over paving stones, their edges broken up irregularly
    02Master materialsI made every master material in the game, including neon holo signs and vertex paint blends broken up with world space noise.
  3. Cables strung between stacked shipping containers, strings of coloured lights hanging along them
    03Artist toolsI built placement tools from artist requests for Lectra City's cables, skyline and buildings. Each one updates live as it's placed.
  4. A buggy blasting a rival with the auto turret, the banner reading 'Rivz was eliminated by You using COV Turret!'
    04Gameplay programmingI programmed the parts system, made all item behaviour and reworked the vehicles to use arcade physics.
  5. The finished start straight, neon signs and street lights under a curving overpass and an orange sky
    05Producing a team of 11I ran the SCRUMs, the schedule and every build for an 11-person team, and planned in the buffer time that kept us on track to the end.

Overview

Borderline Racing was my Year 2 group project at Escape Studios. The brief was a vertical slice of a racing game based on an existing AAA game, made in Unreal Engine 5.4. Our team, picked Borderlands 3 (Gearbox Software, 2020) for its unqiue inked art style and chaotic gameplay, and recreated the area, Lectra City.

It’s an elimination racer where the last car is knocked out every lap. Cars are built from parts that change how they drive, and a vareity of items can be used mario-kart style.

It was a finalist for Game of the Year, Console and PC, at The Rookies 2025, after first picking up a draft selection.

Gameplay snippet.
A low angle view of a street dipping under a concrete overpass lined with green neon strips, stairs climbing to a raised walkway, and a huge tiered building with glowing green windows behind it
Underpass
The sewer section of the track, orange lit water running between a graffiti covered wall and banks of sand and dead reeds, with green item boxes floating over the water and a highway crossing above
Sewer
A street corner of stacked concrete buildings with a pink neon sign and three tall screen signs, the road running off under a raised highway past containers and a parked truck
Corner
A high view over Lectra City, rooftops and cables in the foreground, a long highway across the middle and a skyline of tall towers with lit windows against a hazy orange sky
Skyline

    Downloads

    The retrospective I wrote at the end of the module.

    Retrospective (PDF)

    Credits

    I was Producer, Technical Artist, VFX & Material Artist, and Gameplay Programmer. The rest of the team’s roles are below:

    The team

    The three external tools used in the project were:

    Reflections

    The art got the most compliments, both in playtests and in our industry feedback sessions. The weakest part is definitely the gameplay despite the improvements to the movement (Which is still a big win). It works for a vertical slice, but it doesn’t have the depth we planned in the treatment. We had to cut the tertiary loop, levelling up to earn new items and parts, so there isn’t much reason to come back after a few races.

    I do feel like part of the weak gameplay was the brief. A racing game limited what we could make and the tools and system I could build, not to mention racing is a niche genre and is mostly held by a few big franchises for a reason (Gamestats, 2025).

    I also took on too much. Taking on some many roles led to burnout, and while it worked out over 14 weeks, it was alot by the end. The amount of roles also meant I was able to dedicate myself to anyone roles and do it too the level I would want. This however did teach me a lesson I brought onwards to Project UMBRAE.

    Sources