Appreciate the indepth commentary!
For now I'm just happy that the health system actually allows to finish a level. Without it's even more of a mess.
And nice that you tried it without the effects. That was my first goal of the entire project, to see how effects can affect gameplay and how much is too much. You mean all of the flashing freeze frames or specific ones on your own car or on other objects?
I'm not sure yet about the burnout effect. At first I just wanted to see if I could. I'm thinking about turning it into an ability (haven't worked on that part yet) that would deal damage or cause confusion or something, but only available to drift-style cars. The bike and porsche don't have the effect if I'm right. But yes, right now it's just of a punishment for hectic steering.
The lag issue has been on my mind. Definitely a big problem.
Kansei Thefto was a port from a previous game that a friend asked me to implement because he likes to driver over pedestrians, lol. I haven't yet implement more police/heat variations that would appear.
I appreciate the commitment to beating it! The vertical slice right now is more or less a "throw everything in there" type of deal. Your experience matches my expectations. It's far too messy and too much "meh, can't do anything about it". I'm not sure yet in which direction to go, I might just split it into multiple different games.
Rapid panic clicking could make the lateral momentum stabilize for a short while as a crutch and for squeezing between cars.
Interesting. I've been experimenting with a slowmotion effect already for a way to deal with this.
Could be cool to have a drift change sound to vibe to the music through the drift rhythm.
I'm not sure what you mean with drift change sound? But having the music somehow interact with the game in multiple ways was on my mind as well, similar to Eternal Climax. No idea how to work with music though.
What if driving into other cars from the side was more generous and you could push them aside to actually be able to intentionally affect elements in the level with explosions or road blocking?
Yes, that's something on my mind as well. For now I have a small mass system integrated, which determines (extra) damage based on speed, and speed loss. For instance, the truck has enough mass that you won't loss speed when hitting pedestrians.
Thank you very much for the feedback and ideas!