9 exciting ways we enhanced last rounds EXR gaming experience —you probably missed.

We ship a lot for a (very small team ) — and often quietly…

5 min readJul 31, 2023

Today we deep dive into 9 exciting enhancements specifically in time for the Lunar Cup. We honestly were so busy with the Cup functionality — the Raceway racing and betting experiences— that we just didn’t have time to speak to all the other exciting stuff we built for y’all.

These enhancements, were created to excite and redefine your algorithmic racing and prediction experience. Let’s dive into the exciting updates we’ve made as we’re constantly evolving and pushing boundaries 🏁

But before we dive in — remember — we built a browser based game that you can play for pretty much any browser no problem (mobile or desktop with just an email login) no apps, no hardware — completely accessible. Ok here we go…

🎲 Enhanced 3D Art and Asset System

The assets on and around the track got an overhaul, we’re now using custom made high detail 3D art. Thanks to an all new asset system, we can easily add in special effects, animations and procedural elements, like custom animated holograms with ad slots that load content suitable for the current event, and custom shader animations like the finish line portal.

👾 Exciting Special Effects & Animations

We’ve built a library of special effects and animations that can be reused in many places and assets in the game. If new assets and props are added to tracks, we can easily add existing effects to them to make the experience feel alive and interesting, so you’re not just looking at a bunch of static objects.

Oh and to streamline the design, we are now using lines instead of orbs or objects to show the edge of a track — but we made it customizable so we can decide :)

🕯 Advanced Lighting Model

The old lighting has now model has been replaced by a completely new system that gives us much more creative control over the look and feel of the game. Instead of lighting the scene from a single point with a single color, we now light the entire scene from our new custom made HDR skyboxes. In this screenshot we have both green and blue reflections coming from two stars on the skybox. The skyboxes will also reflect off the racecrafts metallic parts. This make the visual experience much cleaner as well.

⛩ Faction-Specific Skybox Art

The new skybox art reflects different environments, each Faction has their own style. There are no longer just distant stars and darkness, there are also bright suns and nebulae depending on the faction’s characteristics. This gives us more ways to create dynamic visual spectacles — depending on what is going on in the game, very exciting.

🏆 Cinematic Winner Stage Scene

To make the ending of a game much more interesting, we designed a new winner stage scene which shows off the winning racers and their NFTs in a cinematic setting. We don’t just place the racecraft models on the winner stage, we also load the avatars of the pilots and place them above it, including some stats about them. We held back on launching this for lunar cup — but we gave a sneak peak in our teaser video :) cant wait to launch this probably for our champs.

📽 Dynamic Camera System

A dynamic camera system has now also been implemented which allows for much more immersive cameras than before — thrilling stuff. Depending on the environment, we can design new types of cameras that fit the aesthetic and then add them into the game.

The chase camera now tilts with the racecraft you’re following, and it also allows you to track a different racer than your own, which is useful if you’re not taking part in the race but predicting on others instead. Its also just overall way more thrilling.

🧠 Race Moment Tracker

We also developed an incredible system that now tracks interesting moments during a race, like impressive takeovers, so we can cue cameras and animations around those moments. Theres a lot more we can do here as well.

🔥 Improved Racer Trails and Leaderboard Graphics

We overhauled the graphics of racer trails and added extra info in the leaderboard. Racers with red trails are boosting, which is now instantly visible.

Before

💸 Enhanced Racer Tracking

To improve the graphics and make it easier to track racers in the distance, we replaced the arrows hovering above racers with leader lines that automatically prevent overlap, so all pilot names are easy to read. If you’re looking at a small group of racers in the distance, you can immediately see who’s leading the pack. A much better viewer experience!