itch.io

Thanks for the in-depth feedback! You can rotate with the mouse-wheel or with Q/E while building. I think we were missing some polishing of the build-phase. This includes the "can't place item" sound and restarting from the already built car. Both good points which we wanted to implement but didn't manage time-wise.

Regarding the Physics-Engine, we switched to Rapier2D in the middle of the jam, because we noticed that physics joints are not handled correctly in the default engine. And we wanted the car to be a little bit flimsy. We could have just added all objects to a single rigid body, which worked, but that wasn't the flair we were going for.

You can try it easily to see what happens without Rapier2D, if you leave out the rapier_<something>.so / .dll file, and start the exe without it adjacent, then godot will use the default engine. And despite no other changes, car just falls apart. The pieces are only held together by the pinjoints, the parent is a Node2D which doesn't move with the car.

In godot physics the alternative was to have a rigid body as the parent of all of them, and the other parts be a child rigid bodies. But this caused some issues as well, as this isn't how Rigid bodies should be connected. So we spent a lot of time tweaking the initial approach, but the car kept exploding, and then we switched to Rapier2D. which worked much better.

The source code is available if you want to have a look: https://github.com/LiquidFun/Grandpas-Hill-Racer

Thank you so much for playing and leaving feedback! Your points regarding sound and restarting were things we would have loved to do given more time. Also introducing the inputs better. Rotating blocks is needed for level 3 and Grandpa reminds you of the feature then, but if we had more time, we would have liked to add a short input section in the menu or a little tutorial.

One main problem we had with Godots physics engine was that the option to set RotationLimits in the PinJoint2Ds just did not work. This seems to be a known bug. Thus, all of our rigidbodies could rotate freely, leading to the cars practically deflating. We tried to add this behaviour by hand but ultimately decided to switch the engine as LiquidFun noted.

Also keep in mind that both our Engine Switch and using SmartShape2D led to us not being able to provide an HTML build. As some people only play web-based builds, these are super useful to get more feedback in a Jam. So you should think twice about switching engines if one of your main goals is to get a lot of plays. It did really help in our case, tho.