Borderline Racing

[Rookie Awards 2025 Finalist]
Borderline Racing is the culmination of my 2nd year group project across 14 weeks at Escape Studios, with 8 other team members contributing. Our aim was to make a vertical slice of a racing game in the style of an existing AAA game. Our group decided on Borderlands 3 and aimed to replicate the Lectra City area. We used Unreal Engine 5.4.
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In the project, I took on a variety of roles such as Producer, Technical Artist, VFX Artist, Material Artist, and Gameplay programmer.
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Producer - Throughout development, I helped keep the team on track and project to scale and organise anything related to the project, like SCRUM & Trello, and in-engine, such as folder and sub-level structure, development screenshots, cinematic and project builds.
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Technical Artist - As the team’s technical artist, a central point was developing tools throughout development to fit the artists’ needs and understanding their use cases. Tools to speed up the artist process were developed, such as randomised skyscrapers, curved-based cables with hanging parts supported, prop vehicles and modular building colours. I also handled making sure the asset pipeline was set up correctly and adhered to our module restrictions, as well as keeping the project optimised for real-time using Nanite and LODs and setting adjustments.
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VFX Artist - I made all the VFX shown in the project, I created optimised Niagara particles that are used both environmentally and for item and vehicle effects. I also created the iconic outline shader for our project, which Borderlands is known for, using scene depth and normals to detect the outlines with the ability to disable outlines on specific actors.
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Material Artist - I was in charge of the master materials used throughout, such as the holographic signs, opaque, decal and the layer blend that allows for 4 different materials on top of a base. It uses noise to help break up the vertex paint and is in world space for seamless cross-actor blending. All the materials designed for artists were made with easy-to-use parameters and kept clean and readable.
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Gameplay Programmer - I handled a lot of gameplay elements, especially related to higher-level systems. I created the item and damage handling behaviour, and all items' logic, floating damage numbers and position UI. Elements like the menu and gamemode state and camera system and behaviour like the startlights and loading cinematic state. Destructible props, track bounds and spline. For vehicles, I converted the project over to an arcade physics system, made the part's stat and visual systems, vehicle driving behaviour and visuals, and tweaked AI behaviour.
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Overall, the project was an amazing learning experience, and I enjoyed working hard on it. I am proud to be a part of my team and call myself the producer of this work.
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Credit:
Cinematic by Oliver Coote & Me
Borderline Racing Logo by Radost Marinova
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Team Members:
Milly Proudfoot - Environment & 2D Artist
https://www.artstation.com/millyproudfoot7
Oliver Coote - Environment & Lighting Artist
https://www.artstation.com/olivercoote44
Vidmantas Jonaitis - Environment & Vehicle Artist
https://www.artstation.com/dfk
Joe Gerrard - Prop & Weapon Artist
https://www.artstation.com/j_gerrard_05
Radost Marinova - Character & UI Artist
Jack Bird - Vehicle & Prop artist
Shah Ahmed - Prop Artist
Dylan Harvey - Game Designer