Loved this! Really impressed that you implemented a mini-map, and gaining access to features like the radio as a reward for paying your debt is a great idea. The car handling was excellent too.
I'd maybe have less camera sway, as having it on all the time can be a bit nausea-inducing, maybe pull out the field of view when you're at full throttle to get that sense of speed instead?
Overall really enjoyed it though, great work!
Thanks, Sir Knight. Yeah, I realized pretty quickly that a minimap was going to be necessary. I've never done one before, this one took the better part of a day of development to get it working. The method I went with involves a second camera in the scene that takes a snapshot from way up high as the scene is loading, gets rid of extraneous details via the use of layers, and then renders to a texture before disabling itself, then the render texture then gets sent into the UI. Then I just had to transpose the player's transform position onto it with a little math.
I wanted to do a game in a Cyberpunk setting where you weren't a violent gangster but just a kid coming of age and trying to move up in the world, but who is ultimately held back by an unfair cycle of debt, a trap that I think a lot of young people today find themselves caught in, especially students. That lack of upward social mobility, paralleled in the fact that your car *doesn't* fly is my take on the theme, Life in Two Dimensions. I hope I didn't stretch it too far or go too abstract. That's also why I didn't add an explicit "You Win" or "You Lose" state. Ultimately, you're just stuck. There is no moving up. No third dimension.
But of course, it's a video game, so adding some token rewards for a sense of progression felt absolutely necessary in the end. Hopefully my idea of the theme comes through.
