Hello Robert,
It took a while to respond. It's been a busy week and I needed some time to think about answers, while working late on the branching road.
- Unity vs Unreal: I've chosen Unity for its accessability/low learning curve. It takes some time for me to get familiar with a new platform. It even took me years to get to the point where I am now, and it's probably going to take me quite some time (months?) to just refactor everything to Unreal. If I know myself, I'm probably going to abandon the project if I try this, like I did with my other projects that grew over my head in the past.
- I'm a really big fan of the esthetics of 80's Overdrive. Bright and colorful, all sprite based, looks like Outrun, ... There's another game on Itch.io (Max Downforce) that uses 3d car models. It works for a still image, but in motion it doesn't click with me. I like the choppy animation of the sprites when you see an AI car going around a corner, although it's a lot more cumbersome to program. (But I already did the programming, so meh.) But I like the idea of using 3d models and make images in different angles of them.
Police and radar: yes, I've been thinking about that for quite some time. The police shouldn't be too annoying, but annoying enough to motivate you to get the radar stuff. Perhaps the radar stuff can be upgrades in my current parts system.
Then, what should be the speed limit? It shouldn't be too low, because that's the speed traffic should drive. The lower, the more difficult the game will be. I've been experimenting with a speed limit and a limit between 220 and 260 kph works well (which is absurd in reality ofcourse.) This speed limit will probably stay in my next update.
I also want the police to chase your opponent if he's ahead of you, to make things fair, giving the winning driver a disadvantage, just like in Test Drive 2: the Duel.
- Railway crossings: cool idea!
- Countries, landmarks and seasons: sounds great! It sounds a bit like Outrunners.
- About the gray boxes/placeholders: it depends on the objects. Perhaps some combinations and patterns work better than other's, but my system is pretty modular. It's always possible to move objects.
- Speaking of modularity: each corner and each hill is created by a single line of code that's easily edited, or moved. One disadvantage: you have to restart the game each time you make a change to see the result. But perhaps I can make a track editor.
- Sprites and sprite sheets: at this point every object has its own sprite, but putting them all in a single sheet per country for example shouldn't be much of a problem. Right now the naming is like O_tree, where O stands for Outrun, TO for Turbo Outrun CSM for custom and so on...
- Publishers, Kickstarter, ...: OK, as long as the code is pretty much finished, or at least in a state that there aren't any programming challenges any more.
- Good idea about a contract and bank account!
- About the royalty free music: good idea, but I'm going to make it in a way that the music is easily replaceable by the user.
Meanwhile I'm going to continue working on the branching road!