Continuing Development

Hi all,

Making an update to let anyone concerned that development is still happening on this game.

I know, I know, it was just a silly little jam game made in two days, but it's a fun with a quirky little mechanic.

Who knew that the idea for the tapping was from flappy birds, somehow that impacted the design choice of this game. The original inspiration for actually making this was music. Specifically Pizza hotline - Level Select: it's 90's drum n bass that I found on bandcamp. It has all those nostalgic notes that made me pine for those PS1 titles like Wipeout.

Anyways, back on the game.

It's had a visual overhaul (actually thinking of doing it again to fit in with the theme better).

The first of three planned levels is on Venus, high up in the cloud city, interconnected by sprawling streets that connect clusters (reasoning away the procedural generation). I've been doubling down on the random and adding a lot of additional modular assets, reused a lot to save on time and upgraded existing. Before any kind of release, I will be polishing the heck out of this as there's still quite a few bugs with misaligned track pieces, collision detection failing and sudden movement stopping on Android (not even sure if I want to continue development for the phone, may do that later once complete).

As you can see there's a lot of floating building, I will eventually redo the models to fit in more with the floating nature of this. Too messy to make them extend to below the clouds. Also being Venus, that wouldn't make much sense.

So how is it any different.

Well, mechanically it may be the same, everything has been expanded on and tweaked. Vehicles feel more fluid and faster. Oh and there's multiple to choose from. Many inspired from Wipeout and many more to come. on that note. The current roster can be seen below, each model is under 500 tris. Keeping low poly was important to me as I want to cram in heaps of detail and still run fast on any potato system.

The current build on Itch.io has AI and this has been worked on to function exactly the same. The reason for this is I wanted the AI to have the same advantage/disadvantage as the player and work in a dynamic way without any nav meshes or understanding of the track ahead of it. The disadvantage to this setup at the moment is that it doesn't work with the new turning system. (the position of the player is also linked into this so just extra work to change at the moment).

On the new turning the system. The original Jam game was in a straight line, camera never rotated and the player went forward. Now there are track segments that change the rotation of the camera/player without player input, the reason(motivation) behind this is those psuedo 3d racers of yore where the player is effectively always going forward but there's an illusion of turning. Well there's actual turning but the it's all translated to a straight motion. Don't mistake that for not needing to turn as the vehicle still has momentum in the direction it was going, so expect to hit some walls :).

If you're interested in how I achieved this effect, I made a video on it 

Any question of queries please feel free to ask. I want to be as open about the development and share whatever I can (either assets or tutorials)

I'll create a list at some point with every change, but another time.

You're welcome to check out the current build to see how much has changed.

I will continue to work on this and to polish the style and gameplay until hopefully a release. There's still quite a bit of work before I upload a playable version, until then.