Hey all,  its Leo on behalf of Team Hi-lite, last year we made Death Whisper Diaries, and World in Ruin the year before.

Fancy new logo render by Shabello

This year Team Hi-lite has grown a bit, some of the team members couldn't participate full time so we took on some extra help to fill in the gaps, LoaMcLoa is working on concept art alongside Esskaden, Lamsjams is working with Shabello on some of the music, Esper is helping me out with 3D assets and Max is helping as a programmer as both our programmers from last year were unavailable this time.

In some ways, having such a big team adds more pressure on us to make something bigger and better than last year which can be a bit stressing, especially since we decided to make something that's a bit different than our older, more story driven games.

We always try to make something very different from the year before and this time we had an idea for a racing game.

Back with World in Ruin we actually started with an idea for a kart racer but it quickly evolved into an adventure game where the vehicle aspect became just a traversal mechanic.

For our new game we wanted to make something that felt like the original Wipeout games mechanically but we have been looking at lots of racing games from the PS1 and N64 era for inspiration.

BBQ Riderz is a hovercar racing game, which means the driving is inspired by games like Wipeout, F-zero and even other more physics based racing games like Wave Race 64

The general idea is that you get to play as racers inspired by the original characters, but there's a bit of early 2000s edge to their new designs.

The character choice being a villain instead of a protagonist meant that letting players choose from multiple playable characters felt like a better fit this time.

Some character design examples from LoaMcLoa

Last year we felt like it took us too long to get the core mechanics playable and therefore we had less time to work on actual content, it meant that DWD was a fairly short experience that didn't really explore the puzzle mechanics deeply, this year we knew that we needed to focus in getting the core mechanics into a playable state early on so that we had more time to iterate on them and create more playable content.

So far we have most of the core game mechanics set up and have been making internal builds to play through as we add new mechanics.

Its all a bit rough visually atm but the focus has been on mechanics first and making sure that the game feels good to play before we make it look pretty.

We have a ton more concept art and other still WIP stuff that we could show but I'll save it for a more art focused dev log post later down the line.

Next week we will work on the remaining game mechanics, finish the character redesigns we have left and start working on some 3D assets.

Hey all, It's the end of the second week and so far, everything has progressing smoothly at Team Hi-lite.

The second and third weeks are always the most stressful, we've started work on mostly everything but nothing is done yet, so it can get a bit overwhelming thinking about how much is left and seeing the list of tasks grow bigger and bigger.

2D art is probably the furthest along, all the characters have concept art, logos and rough vehicle art, we've figured out how we want things to play out story wise for each racer, a lot of UI work has also been completed and is undergoing implementation at the moment, Character select screen is already in game.

We also have animated 2D sequences like the Team Hi-lite logo last week, there's gonna be a few more in the game as well.

We're gonna have ending illustrations for each character and have planned out how they are gonna look but haven't finished any of them yet, we probably won't show them off in the devlogs, gotta keep some things secret until the game is out.

Story will be handled in a pretty different way than we've done before, instead of a linear narrative we're doing arcade mode grand prix where players can play as different characters, and when you beat the campaign you get an ending illustration showing what happens if that character wins, it means that seeing everything the game has to offer will take longer than 30 min but each "run" is far shorter than that.

We originally planned to have a fixed narrative with a specific playable character and more story content but letting players choose who to play ended up being a better fit for this type of game.

I'm still working on how long I want the campaign for each character to be, we currently have 7 playable characters, with 2 unlockable ones, we have 3 tracks with 1 "final" track planned as well, we might have each campaign go through all 4 tracks or just 2 tracks each character so that they feel less repetitive to play through.

We're also thinking about having single race and time trials available for fun, the mechanics are there so it's not a ton of extra work to implement.

We've also started working on 3D art a bit, we have some landscape and foliage assets in game and a few other high priority assets like the modular track mesh and textures.

We have 3 different tracks in the at the moment, there's a 4th final track planned but we haven't started working on it yet.

We still need a bunch of env. art for each map but the main thing missing art wise are the different vehicles, we have some good ideas how they're gonna look but will flesh out the concepts a bit before we start working on the final assets.

We're going for a fairly stylized art style, not quite as cartoony as Death Whisper Diaries but we want the 3D to feel in sync with the 2D art we've been getting.

the CRT and vertex wobble filters have also been implemented, giving the game the old school PSX look we always go for.

Audio is generally handled fairly late in development, we've started collecting some assets and are even doing some voice acting for the announcer and characters, we're still working on the script a bit but have found people willing to contribute their voices.

Mechanics wise there's been a lot of progress, main menu, character select and all vehicle mechanics are in but will all get a bit of iteration later on as polish.

Main missing thing is the AI, our programmer Max has been working on it but we haven't merged it into the main branch yet, there's a few mechanics dependent on the AI so its the next big thing we need to focus on getting in, so we can work on race position tracking, scoring and the grand prix win/lose states.

Overall I feel pretty good about our progress so far, the plan was to have a playable build in the first week and by week 3 I want the game in an "alpha" state, as in all main mechanics are in and you can get from start to finish in some capacity, whether or not we manage to get there depends on how AI implementation goes.

That's it for this week, next week I hope to have some in game footage in video format with the correct HUD and a proper vehicle asset and some AI racers.

So it's the end of the 3rd week of the jam, last week I said our focus was on getting the AI in, and add some proper HUD and ship models.

Thankfully we've had a pretty productive week, AI implementation started in the middle of the week and went pretty smoothly, our first iteration was a pretty basic Spline path that the CPU would follow rigidly, this meant that the CPU felt very static and the handling was completely fake, after a rework and iteration on the logic we've made it so that instead the CPU is always chasing a point on the spline path ahead of itself but its subject to the same physics as the player, before if you slammed into an AI it wouldn't budge, since it was on a fixed path, now you can affect the pathing of CPU ships a bit, though they will always get back on track fairly fast.

Asset wise the in-game HUD is more or less finalized, all the assets and the logic behind them is working as intended, position tracking was dependent on having other racers so it had to be implemented once AI was in, there is still some jank regarding completing a lap and pos tracking but I have a few ideas on how to fix it already.

We're also made some progress on 3D assets, so far we have 5/9 ships in game with proper textures, I'm pretty happy with the work so far, each ship has a ton of personality.

There is still a ton of work left, We're starting to implement audio, and there's a few UI elements left, like the end of match scoreboard and the ending screens.

I feel pretty good about our progress in general but the next 2 weeks will be fairly hectic, we wanted to get a playtest build out this weekend but it's gonna have to wait a bit as there are a few key aspects of the build that aren't really in a playtestable state, hopefully we'll get it out during the week but next weekend is more likely.

Next devlog hopefully we'll have all the ships in, wrapped up the remaining UI and started on finishing the gameplay loop with ending screens.

Oh and I said I would show off some gameplay so here it is: