WORK IN PROGRESS

Split
Shift

A 3D open world Unity racing game: street-level gang culture, aggressive modified cars, and a dark comic look.

00Overview

Split Shift is an open world racing game built in Unity, with distinctive visuals and vehicle physics, VR support, model deformation and opponent AI, all wrapped around an addictive gameplay loop.

Unity
C#
Open World
VR
Mesh Deformation
Opponent AI

01Art Style & Direction

Core Aesthetic: A "Dark Comic" or "Gritty Cel-Shaded" style. It blends the high-energy, thick-lined cartoon look of classic arcade racers with a much heavier, more dangerous urban atmosphere.
Character & Vehicle Models: 3D models use the "inverted hull" technique or custom post-processing to generate thick, graphic black outlines. Cars should look aggressive and heavily modified, reflecting the street-level gang culture.
Textures: Environment and vehicle textures use flat, highly saturated colours with hard shadows, avoiding realistic physically-based rendering (PBR) noise. Custom graffiti tags and gang insignias, authored heavily in Photoshop, are used as decals to visually map out faction territories across the city walls.

References

Cel-shaded blue Skyline drifting on a purple mountain road lined with autumn trees — Cel-shaded cars, flat saturated colour

Comic-style underpass covered in graffiti with thick black linework — Thick linework, graffiti, urban decay

02Lighting & Atmosphere

High-Contrast Environments: The world relies heavily on the contrast between pitch-black, dirty alleyways and blindingly bright neon signs.
Tonal References: The environmental mood should capture the heavy, grounded tension and bleak street lighting of gritty urban crime dramas like Kin or Luther, filtered through a stylised, comic-book lens.
Weather Effects: Stylised rain, drawn as thick, slanted streaks rather than realistic particles, and highly reflective wet roads that bounce neon streetlights back up at the player, amplifying the dark city vibe.

Reference

Wet city street at night lit by a single streetlight — Bleak street lighting, wet reflective roads

03Colour Palette

The City Core (Neutral / Dark): Deep asphalt blacks, concrete greys, and muted, dirty brick reds form the baseline.

Asphalt
Concrete
Dirty Brick

Faction Identifiers (High Saturation): Each gang has a distinct, aggressively bright primary colour. These colours dominate their territories through graffiti, vehicle underglow and hideout lighting, making it instantly clear whose turf you are driving through.

Toxic Green
Electric Magenta
Hazard Yellow

04UI & HUD

In-Game HUD: Minimalist but stylised. Speedometers and minimaps look like they are spray-painted or stencilled onto the screen, using rough edges and dripping paint motifs.
Menus: Diegetic where possible. Selecting a gang mission might mean navigating a corkboard of polaroids, crude maps and pinned graffiti tags rather than a standard digital menu list.

05Gameplay

Coming soon.

06Screenshots

Coming soon.