The snippets of text you've posted so far are really well-written and powerful. I'm looking forward to checking this out once it's done!
A member registered Jan 03, 2018
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Devlog Update #2
Sorry for the delay between updates - we have been making progress, just rather chaotically and as such weren't able to keep up any sort of regular update schedule.
Unfortunately Wren has health issues that limit how much energy they have to do things each day, and it turns out coding is more exhausting than they hoped, so they've had to take a backseat on this project. They're still going to contribute if they can though, and they did get all of the important stuff done in the first few days. I'll be consulting with them a fair bit too, as they're better with Construct 2 than I am.
Anyway, when we left off last time the game was pretty basic. It's still far from playable, but we've made some great strides. First off, new art assets!
A much better looking car - currently the only one I've made, though I have plans to put several others in the game with differing stats. That's kind of a stretch goal though. I made this sprite in Paint.NET with the base colours on one layer and transparent shading on another, so it's super easy to make alternate paintjobs for it, like this:
Aside from cars, I also have basic sprites for the power-ups done:
They are, in order: Bees, Fire, Reverse Controls, Heal, Lightning, Spikes, and Oil Slick. Reverse Controls and Heal both just affect the players, whilst the others add a hazard to the track. If the power-up is activated by the player mid-lap then it adds it temporarily, whereas crossing the finish line whilst holding a power-up adds the hazard permanently to a section of the track. This means the track gets harder as more laps are completed, but players can still activate powers mid-lap if they think it's worth it. I have had several other ideas for power-ups, and for the hazards "levelling up" as more power-ups are applied to the same section of track, but those are stretch goals. A couple of these might end up getting cut for sake of simplicity (oil slick and bees are somewhat similar, in that they affect how easy it is to steer, but oil slick is easier to implement - same with fire and spikes, with spikes being very simple and fire being more complex) but these are the core 7 I want to try and implement first.
The track has also gotten a visual upgrade:
I've only gotten the straight segments done at the moment, but now that I've got the visual style sorted getting the other pieces done should be faster.
Now, onto gameplay/coding changes! Wren has made it so power-ups spawn on spawners placed manually on the track. The game keeps track of how many power-ups there are on the track at any time and spawns more on a random spawner that doesn't already have a power-up and isn't touching a player vehicle, like so:
The power-ups are also no longer applied to the track immediately on pick-up, but are stored as a variable in the car object. Players can then press a button to activate their stored power-up. Whilst we do have very basic graphics and effects for the hazards these power-ups cause they're no where close to done - that's the next major hurdle we need to overcome.
I've also implemented code to keep track of how many laps a player has completed. We were worried this would be vulnerable to exploits if done incorrectly (e.g. players may just be able to drive back and forth across the finish line to increase their lap count), and as victory is determined by the player who has completed the most laps, it's important to get it right. The system I've implemented uses a variable called LapProgress that counts up as the player goes around the track in order, and checks to see if their LapProgress is high enough to indicate that they've done a full lap when they touch the start/finish tile again. If they have, their currentLap variable increases by one, and their LapProgress is reset to 0. Otherwise it just resets LapProgress to 0. This prevents most exploits, but may need refining further.
So, yeah. Progress has been made, but we've still got a long way to go! Next goal: Making the graphics and code to have the different hazards appear on the track (which means I'll have to figure out how to draw a swarm of bees).
Aaaa thanks so much! I am planning to make transition animations to play on the track-screens when powerups get applied to them, but right now we need to focus on getting the game working, as our prototype currently has quite a few bugs. D:
Wren was originally going to put gifs directly in the post, but we thought it was distracting and hard to read the text when there's a gif looping right by it, so we put them behind image links. But speaking of .gifv files, have a preview of what I've been working on:
