This morning, I spent a few hours showing off the ups-and-downs of Need for Speed: Payback, the latest entry in the long-running racing series. I drifted, I slammed on the NOS, I came hot off the line, I... did other racing things. But the most important thing I did was design the official car of the underground Waypoint Racing team.
When I worked on Forza 6 DLC, i had my own Xbox in the cube and a build of Forza, one day during some downtime I tried making the ugliest car I could.
Thanks to a life spent growing up in the midwest, I knew exactly what a shitty car looks like. The shittiest car in the game, In my opinion, is the Mustang 2. Now the Mustang 2 was the mustang built during the 70’s gas crisis, and the chassis was based off the Ford Pinto. They look like this
So what I did is I used a bunch of graphics and layered on a nasty rusty patina, giving areas of the wheel wells, door sills, and window frames heavier levels of rust. Over that, streaks of water coming from the door handles and the mirror stalks on the door. Then I changed the color of the front fender, the right door, the hood, and the front facia to all be different colors, as if the car was in an accident and the owner had hastily rebuilt the car using junkyard parts, the front bumper and on some of the fenders I put some simulated duct tape on, as many cars in the midwest are held together that way.
The defining details were the rear bumper, which I adorned with Sunoco bumper stickers. Sunoco gives stickers away at gas stations and folks in the Atlantic American Coast will put them on their cars hoping to get free gas.
Lastly I inflated the tires to full capacity to simulate bald, cheap tires, and adjusted the suspension such that the front was higher than the front, simulating someone with a bunch of junk in the rear trunk.
it was such a masterpiece, I wish I had taken a photo.
