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A jam submission

Rambling RoadsView game page

Simple racing game where you try to get to the finish as fast as possible
Submitted by Sigma-Erebus — 3 hours, 26 minutes before the deadline
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Rambling Roads's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
How much fun is this game?#23.2664.000
How technically impressive is this game?#43.2664.000
How creative/original is this game?#42.8583.500
Overall#43.1303.833

Ranked from 2 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

You name
Hidde Derks

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Comments

Host

We really need a policy on plugins and asset imports, just so I know what to praise and where - the car is from the template, but the checkpoints and guiding arrow? That's some nice work if you did that yourself.

The checkpoints are WAY to precise, but that's a lesson in design - think through what you need them to do, and how/where/when they need to be triggered.

The race itself felt nice - I found a few corners a bit tight, but I was forgetting there was a handbrake, and I liked the variation in width of the track. The bridge/waterfall at the end was a nice touch, too!

Developer

indeed, the car is from the template, i would have wanted to replace it with another skeletal mesh, but for some reason that broke the template due to C++ integration which i don't really know much about. i tried to just have two meshes in there, one for driving and collisions, and one for looks, but i couldn't get the wheel animations to work. so i decided to go back to the template car which i know worked.

As for the checkpoint and arrow system, i made this myself as a slight tool if you got flipped. in the early testing i already noticed that the car could sometimes be a bit twitchy and have a tendency to land on it's back. So as a means of orientation i decided to add some checkpoints with an arrow pointing to the checkpoints in order to get the player moving in the right direction again after a vehicle flip had disoriented them. 

About the checkpoints being very precise, yes, I tried looking into pointing to the nearest point within a volume, but that was a lot of work, so i opted for pointing towards a single point (the center of the collision volume). I thought that this would be plenty because it's meant as general orientation anyways.

Host

Wow - that is some nice work on the checkpoints, then! (And the car flipping)

Pointing the arrow to the center of the volume should work fine. I mean it's got to point somewhere, right? ;)

The problem I had arose from the fact I could drive around the checkpoint, to the point it would be briefly directing me backwards, or sideways. Easy solution would be to make a rule for level designers - always make sure the collision volume for the checkpoints covers the full width of the track and slightly more than one car-length thick to prevent this.

Developer

well, yes and no.

as i've got it currently, every checkpoint does span the entire width of the road, often spanning into the rockface as well, but what i'll do different next time is have them point a bit beyond the checkpoint, or have the collision volumes be a bit thicker, so it get's triggered further before the center of the checkpoint. So that it doesn't get the chance to point backwards before it updates to point towards the next checkpoint.

Submitted

Hi Hidde, your game looks great! The car feels really nice to control, it's very intuitive. The map looks great, it doesn't feel too long, although it starts to feel kind of same-y after a short bit. I would maybe have placed the bridge about halfway through the level? The only real gripes that I have with this is that the bridge flipped my car into the ravine while it didn't feel like I was going too fast for it or anything, that might be weird hitboxes/angles? Besides that the countdown timer got stuck at 0.01 in my face. 
You did a really great job!

Developer

yeah, i constructed the bridge out of individual wooden planks, and when testing realized the collisions were slightly off, so i put blocking volumes in to replace the collision of the planks themselves, it improved it, but i think it still wasn't smooth enough.

and as for the timer getting stuck at 0.01, i know what you mean, and i've had this issue sometimes as well, but i've never been able to pinpoint the problem, as it only happens sometimes. for me closing the game and starting it again did the trick.