Open-Water Boat Racing

What it is

The original brief was a VR boat racing experience, head-tracked, motion-controlled, designed for headsets. The mechanic was simple: race through a sequence of checkpoint rings across open water, beat the timer, score on time bonuses.

It later got deployed as a physical installation in a luxury retail mall, dual-screen, with custom ship's-wheel controllers built specifically for the booth. The themed framing was set by the deployment client; the underlying system was the same.

In 2026 I rebuilt the whole thing on Unity 6.4 with a proper pirate ship, a portrait-orientation HUD (SCORE / TIMER / CHECKPOINTS), and a cleaner checkpoint system. The newer version is designed to run on vertical screens, kiosks, mobile, mall installations.

Architecture

The core game system is built on three pieces I designed to be reusable: a course definition (a directed sequence of checkpoint rings with positions and rotations), a checkpoint detection layer (collider-based, with event hooks for ring entry, completion, miss), and a scoring system (time, accuracy, completion bonus). The same core handles VR, mall installation with custom hardware, and mobile portrait.

Unity scene view. Course (object that holds the checkpoint sequence), Timer, Scoring all top-level.

Per-checkpoint script. Ring motion, detection radius, OnRingComplete / OnRingMissed events. Designer-friendly inspector.

What the installation taught me

The mall deployment was the part of this project I have learned most from. Lessons from shipping software into a physical kiosk that strangers use unsupervised:

• Custom controllers fail differently than gamepads. A ship's wheel has different latency and resolution characteristics. The control mapping had to be retuned for the booth.
• Onboarding has to be zero. No tutorial screens. The player walks up, sees the boat, sees the wheel, sees the timer, and starts.
• Reset has to be instant. A booth that takes 20 seconds to reset between players loses traffic. The system resets in under one second.
• Visual feedback has to be loud. A mall is noisy. Checkpoint passes have to be visually obvious from across the venue.

Stack

What this project demonstrates

• Multi-target Unity systems. Same core, shipped as VR, mall installation, and portrait kiosk.
• Production discipline for installations. Reset, recovery, idle states, controller failure handling.
• Long-term maintenance. The system has been rebuilt and improved across years rather than abandoned.