We’re delighted to introduce our first 3D driving game! Driving Academy is a brand new series on CBBC that’s been created by production company, Lucky Day. The show is presented by Joe Swash and sees four children and their careless parents undertake an intense fortnight of driving masterclasses, learning about road safety and safe driving with a team of crash dummies to show them how it should NOT be done!

Our driving experience game reconstructs the learning car, the track and a number of ‘hazard’ obstacles you’ll need to avoid. These appear much like the cut-out ‘enemy’ billboards you see in American FBI shooting ranges in the movies – here though, the trick is NOT to hit them!

Over the course of 3 levels the obstacles appear more frequently and include not only pop up billboards but fast moving chickens! The main difference with this driving game however, is that you need to drive CAREFULLY at all times: watch your speed limit or you’ll be flashed by the speed cameras! Your score will be affected by any obstacle hits, camera flashes or off road crashes, so drive safely and keep your eyes on the road. The whole experience is overseen by Joe Swash’s dulcet tones as he encourages you around the track, “Remember it’s not about going fast – because that’s dangerous!”

BBC technical guidelines meant that we had to create something that would work in Flash 10 and we weren’t allowed to use Unity (which would have been the natural technology for making a game such as this). However, we’ve been experts at delivering real-time 3D in Flash for many years and we’re really proud of the results we managed to achieve in Away 3D.

The game went through extensive user testing with plenty of kids finding that the temptation to hurtle around the track was sometimes too good to resist! Still, we put a lot of effort in to ensuring that the experience of driving slowly and carefully was still as fun as possible – but we do understand the urge to race around the track regardless!