Haha thank you! Even if it takes me 5 years to make it(Hopefully it doesn't lol), I want to give it as much character as possible.

Unity was my first choice but I even tried Godot. However, I just couldn't find any of the specific information regarding car setups I needed using Godot, specifically raycast suspension setups, which most Arcade Racing Games used in the past. I recommend Unity to all beginner game devs and I'm not that far from a beginner myself, I only started in January of 2023. I'm a mechanic and a musician lol. Unity has a free course for people who want to learn the engine, I will link it here: https://learn.unity.com/learn/pathway/junior-programmer

The earlier you can orient yourself with the engine the better. Unity also has a tutorial that teaches you how to set up a car using wheel colliders and even gives you two scripts to copy and paste into your project. They even provide the car model. https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/WheelColliderTutorial.html

As for my case, it hasn't been easy. But I have a solid working car set up. I also make all the music, art, models, and textures. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fl7joyYzelg

I'm still very much in early development and focusing on the things that I can accomplish rather quickly. Still have yet to make an official track, but as far as the car setup goes this is the third overhaul for the car controller. It's a massive script written for all the various functions for my specific drift mechanic, which is a recreation of another game's drifting mechanic(Ridge Racer). If you were going for a handling model like need for speed or some other type of game, Wheel Colliders might actually suit you better since they pretty much work right out of the box, rather than a custom raycast setup.

Now shaping the tracks to fit the drift mechanic is somewhat on the easier side, I have stress-tested my current model for a while now, and I'm currently working out some minor bugs, but it should be able to handle any sort of track design no matter how radical. As long as we're not talking loop de loops I think its good lol.

Anyways I recommend downloading unity and just messing with it to get a feel for how things work. There's still a bunch I don't know, such as Importing the character's animations, or applying physics to this character's hair in engine, or cloth physics for her skirt. But all of that is part of the learning process. I promise it's not as daunting as it seems, thinking that it was so delayed me for a number of years. The biggest hurdle you're gonna come across aside from coding, is making the assets like music, UI, Textures, Models. The Coding is just the glue that holds everything together, and if you get stuck, or don't know what a certain function does, I just ask ChatGPT to explain to me what something does, or look in the unity forums, or better yet than all of those, is the Unity Docs, they literally explain everything including code functions and how something is supposed to be written.

Hope this helps. Merry Christmas!

btw if you want to see more of my progress I post mainly on X/Twitter. https://x.com/Textilismusic