The Crew Motorfest - Festival Race Track
The Crew Motorfest is a racing game developed by Ubisoft Ivory Tower in collaboration with supporting studios including Ubisoft Romania. During my last months at the romanian studio, I was part of the strike team that was responsible for creating the Festival area of the game that also doubles as its central game hub. When we received the initial brief from the team in Lyon, they had amassed dozens of ideas and concept art that they wanted to include for the Festival. However, due to the location of it on the map, there were several challenges including steep terrain, an existing road network that couldn't be altered and performance concerns due to a different nearby race track. The first thing I did was to isolate the area that we could work in together with our Technical Director based on their performance indicators. Afterwards, I created several layout proposals and presented them to the team. Since this was my first time designing a race track, I tried to keep an open mind and take advice from people that had already worked on previous games in the series. A lot of good feedback came from one of my peers, Vlad Jojatu aka the car guy, and the people in Lyon. By the time I handed over the ownership of the area, I had managed to come up with a prototype of the race track and some basic zoning. I'm happy to say that the race track stayed almost identical to the prototype, while the zoning got a few adjustments here and there. I also want to give a big shoutout to the incredibly talented artists at both studios. The whole Festival area turned out amazing.
Overview of the Festival area that includes the race track and its various activty zones
The different features of the race track around the Festival area
The dragstrip portion of the track where players can let their cars rip
Additional shot of the dragstrip portion with some weenies in the background
After the high speed portion, players enter the mega banked corner.
This corner was received quite favorably in the prototype and later concepted by Alexandra Ujeuca to have overarching curved panels that look like waves.
The curved panels are effective at creating a feeling of surfing inside the wave.
After the mega banked corner, players pass by one of the more whacky sections of the Festival, a massive M that acts as a loop where players can drive through. I initially did a prototype of this with basic modules that was later properly modeled by art.
Continuing through the S-turns, players will start to approach the Volcano tent.
Around the Volcano there is another smaller banked corner that is meant to highlight the scenery. Big shoutout to Davide Merone who was responsible for modeling the tent.
Leaving the Volcano area, players will then enter the Chicanes area, with a nice overview of the entire Festival area.
The Chicanes area is the last area right before the dragstrip begins.
Additional shot of the dragstrip portion.
