Alright, objectives are in.
Green targets on the minimap show where you can find your next objective.
Your target is lit up! (This is too much light, tbh, but I’ll tone it down tomorrow.)
Bump into it to steal its precious cargo.
Do it three times and you’re done! No problem!
This was, of course, harder than it looks for various reasons. But it’s working. So now we REALLY have a game on our hands. You can die, and you can win. Great!
Driving Feel
The afternoon was spent on bugs and driving feel. I prototyped the core driving mechanics before the jam to make sure it was possible and fun enough. It’s hard to write about this sort of thing because it’s so qualitative. But here’s what’s changed:
- Added an “energy” system so you can’t use turbo indefinitely.
- Fixed a bug where you couldn’t collide into a wall if you were “sliding.” This is a pretty un-generous-to-the-player change to make, but it had the effect of making turning in traffic very hard (huge turning radius) but if you turned into an alley you could make it work at max speed no problem. That unpredictability felt off to me. But I may revert this later if it’s simple too easy to crash now.
- Tuned steering parameters up and down a bunch. Essentially, it’s easier to make tighter turns now. The car’s turning radius is ~2 tiles now, and it used to be ~3.
- Fixed braking, and differentiated it from retro thrusting. You can enter movement commands “against” your movement direction, which will slow you but never stop you. To stop, hit spacebar. Whether this will be used or not, I’m not sure. It enables a perfect 90 degree turn if you time it right. I may also use it for regenerative braking? TBD.
- A lot of finnicky work with inputs up/down/repeat to make it feel more intentional.
Test Track
I got tired of testing these changes in the game world itself, so I added a little test track.
Cute huh? I aim to ship this track plus maybe a more complex one with more enemies so players can learn the mechanics. I hope to manage a bit more tutorialization before the end, but in case not … this will at least give you a simpler environment to get a handle on the controls.
Next Up
We’re over the hump now. What’s left?
- Get reload and map changing working. From the title screen, select which mode to start and load that in properly. Ideally, get a refresh working too, so you don’t have to fully reload the page like last year.
- Add some enemy munition variety. Right now it’s all emp-clouds, but I have ideas for more options.
- Figure out how to place enemies in the world in a fun way. Randomly placing cameras feels pretttty good but not perfect.
- Put all the pieces together and balance the core experience. Vision radius of all the enemies versus your speed versus helicopter speed. Many knobs to to turn here.
- Fix some world generation bugs.
- Crank on building out some building variation so it’s not quite so drab out there.
- Performance optimization top to bottom.
- If you complete enough objectives, go to day 2 in a different city.
- Make a “starting building” for the player that’s consistent.
- Make an “exit” building for the player that’s consistent.
Is that it? Easy.