#racing development post

[dogedouge]

Racing Development Post

Player Movement

In the process of testing, it was found that the car would drift automatically and unconsciously. It turned out that the Rotate Objective in the new version of Gdevelop 5 was turned on and off.

Through testplay by myself, I found that the scene where the protagonist directly dies and enters the death screen is too abrupt. It is necessary to add an explosion effect to the death to make the death more natural.

Learning from the experience of the last development, this time I added a death scene to the game, the player can restart the game by pressing the R key

Death Screen

Programming Design

[combatandcoding]

Racing Development Post

My racer took a backseat to assignment two. I don't really like the game mechanics of it at all and I struggled with making assests that conveyed the top down perspective well. I think I will probably stop all together. I think I could recycle my assets from assignment 2 into almost any assignment 3 project as I have constructed enough weapons and sprites of differing designs so we will see. R.I.P Cellmates I hardly Knew Ya.

[skye-wang-blog]

Racing Development Post

This is the third game I have developed, and after this time I have mastered some of the processes and methods necessary for GDevelop to become more proficient in the production of this learning. The gameplay is based on the player steering the car and avoiding the cars on the road.

The mechanics of the racing game are relatively simple for me, as the mechanics of the previous two games allow for active attacks on enemies such as jumping attacks and shooting, in addition to avoiding damage. So in a racing game, the main source of damage is hitting another car, which has an explosion effect. I have a separate health bar for the game, where the player's car has an initial health of 100, which is reduced if it hits another car, and the car hit by the player disappears.

One of the new things I learned while developing this game was the ability to add coordinates of items to the events page to mark locations without having to drag all the items to the main screen, and the ability for trees on both sides of the road to reappear to create a vehicle movement effect. Here are some of the new things I learnt in the events page.

[ilyas-igb220]

Racing Development Post

The development phase of the racing game didn’t go as smooth as I wanted the process to be. The reason for the poor quality in developing the racing game is because I didn’t have enough time to devote in developing and adding my own creative spin on the racing game which led to a few major errors that I overlooked when I labelled the conditions and actions in Gdevelop. At the meantime, the racing game I developed in week 7 & 8 wasn’t on par with my elevator pitch due to several missing features and objects.  

The issues I stumbled across during the development phase of the racing prototype included a few major flaws that I was only able to figure out during the playtesting session, thanks to a colleague from the workshop which helped me with correcting my mistakes. I misspelt “TreeTimer” and “TrafficTimer” which led to duplicated objects in the racing prototype. Another significant issue I was dealing with, was that the cars were moving towards the main red car at an angle over the lanes which wasn’t supposed to happen.  I have attached a video of this below to provide an idea of what it looked like at the mean time. As you can see from the preview, the racing prototype was unplayable.  

[harrisonigb220]

Week 8 - Racing Development Post

Hello, and once again welcome back to my GDevelop blog. This blog I will be covering my development of the MotoStyle, the issues I have encountered, testing and the results of my labour.

Development

When beginning development of MotoStyle and it's open world I needed to find many different assets that could be used to create the roads and environment for Speed City. When searching for the assets however, I came to realize the scope of the project I was undertaking and how much would be required to make even a basic prototype for my testers to give feedback on. This is because of the rules that each object would have to obey to, something I've been including into my design philosophy since reading Fullertons readings, including traffic, and other objects that can be interacted with. How would traffic move around the city? How would they interact with other cars if collided?

Because of all these increasing rules that kept appearing, I decided to change my approach of the open world, into a more hub-based game. It still followed the design of the pitch about getting to the delivery location as fast as possible, however you would return to the hub to select another mission or retry.

This freed up lots of development time and allowed me to focus on the gameplay itself.

Some changes were made to the gameplay also, instead of being able to take the shortest path, I took the practical excersize we worked on in class, and expanded on that. To give players skill expression with finding the fastest path, I implemented boosts which could be missed and would affect your overall time allowing for future replayability.

Testing and Iterations

When testing the game myself I really wanted movement to feel fluid, especially when driving in between cars to try and hit a boost or avoid traffic. To do this I had to focus on both the hitbox and the turning speeds. The initial movement that was implemented from the practical felt too slow for the arcady feel I was trying to go for, and for the van model I selected. Firstly, I increased the acceleration and deceleration, which felt better, however when changing directions still didn't feel reponsive enough. So, I increased the deceleration to be higher than acceleration and this fixed the turning issues almost completely. Next was the hitbox, and based on my previous experience with hitboxes, the perfect hitbox is always just smaller than your actual character model to provide some leeway.

Now that I have a working prototype I'm happy with I get one of my friends to test and provide feedback. Here is a list of the main critiques of Motostyle:

1. Lack of feedback with boost

2. Boosts set to specific times

3. Instant death was too punishing

So the first thing I wanted to do was to make the boost feedback more responsive. To do this I needed everthing else that moved to respond to the boost, not just a hidden variable which would make the finish line appear earlier. I did this by applying the boost variable to all the moving objects for a timed duration.

Next was the boosts being set to specific times. This was something I overlooked, and makes a lot of sense because they spawn exactly the same time each time, you won't be able to get a better run ever. So I change it to spawn randomly in a time frame, to give the levels more replayability.

Finally, I created a health system which would allow for your vehicle to take a couple of hits to feel less punishing when you accidentally made a wrong manuever.

Finale

We have once again reached the end of this development post. Stay tuned for next week where I will be covering the post mortem of the development of MotoStyle. Until then, take care!

Sources

Fullerton, T. (2018). Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, Fourth Edition (4th ed.). A K Peters/CRC Press. https://doi-org.ezp01.library.qut.edu.au/10.1201/b22309

[issy10773169]

Racing Development Post

What have you been trying to achieve in GDevelop?

- Tried doing a multi player but the second car would only move when the first car moved even if it was assigned to different keys.

- Tried adding a timer to the highway so it would change into grass and make the car slower, make the traffic would disappear and instead rocks but the rocks wouldn't spawn and the traffic wouldn't despawn.

What was something you learned?

I should try and research from other sources and to expand my knowledge than solely relying on experimentation alone. I plan to do this with my following assignment and hopefully learn interesting mechanics to implement into GDevelop.

Showcasing design ideas and concepts from/inspired by readings

My pitch in mainly inspired by the balancing techniques mentioned in the week 7 lecture. For my pitch specifically, I had chosen the 'Lizard, frog, mouse race' balancing technique and changed it to chinese zodiac signs.

A screenshot on my attempt to implement changing terrain and obstacles via experimentation:

[kavinsenanayake]

Racing game development

This week i followed the tutorial slides and made my 3rd game on Gdevelop. The game i created was a racing game which the player controls a speeding car and has to maneuver between incoming objects. The game would end when the player crashes. A point system has also been implemented so that the player gains more points the longer they stay alive.  

Sprites have been added into the game to give the racing game more variety in obstacles that the player must avoid. The blue and gray car were programmed to traverse in the same direction as the player but at a slower pace whilst the green and pink cars would drive on the opposing lane. Each car was allocated a lane and appears randomly so that each level is different from the last. 

New animations were added to further enhance the player experience. An animation of an explosion was added so that when the player collides with an object, the player would explode and then die.