Neon Drift

Situation

Synthwave racing has been done a hundred times, but most of it is on-rails or forgivingly slow. I wanted something tight and arcade — every drift mattering, every track playable in under three minutes — and there was nothing in my catalog to point recruiters and jam teams at.

• No recent shipped game in my portfolio
• Wanted to learn shader work end-to-end
• 4-month self-imposed budget

Task

Ship a complete arcade racer — seven tracks, music-reactive visuals, working leaderboard — in 4 months as solo dev. Must run at 60fps on the Steam Deck and look stylized enough that screenshots sell themselves.

• 7 hand-built tracks, no procgen
• Music-reactive bloom + chromatic aberration in a single fullscreen pass
• Steam Deck 60fps as hard constraint

Action

Cut scope hard at month 3 (dropped open-world for tight tracks), built a custom ECS layer on top of Unity GameObjects for traffic AI, and wrote the post-process stack from scratch so every track could share one cheap shader pipeline.

• Custom ECS layer on top of Unity for traffic
• Bloom + chromatic aberration via single fullscreen pass
• Music reactivity tied to FFT — exhaust glow follows the kick drum
• Replaced procgen with 7 hand-built tracks (the call that shipped the game)

Result

Shipped on time, hit 1.2k players in the first month, held a stable 60fps on Steam Deck, and the postmortem became my most-read devlog post.

• Featured on two indie roundups
• Postmortem post drove a 3x bump in newsletter signups

Players · 1mo

1.2k

Steam Deck FPS

60

Tracks shipped

7 / 7

Avg session

14 min