Played in browser, the game looked and ran great. Flat-ish art style and music were great. The perfect-traction physics model allowed for fun racing even without any elevation changes, but the collisions feel awful. Cars seems to sort of teleport away from each other, and don't exchange momentum properly. I can imagine that the perfect-traction model limits the sort of collision physics available, but perhaps a different compromise would be better. Maybe the cars exchange momentum a la Newton, but instead of sliding sideways they just turn into their new velocity vector.
The bots were good, but not unbeatably so. Still, they could use more variance, as getting 3rd place is about as hard as getting 1st. Give us one slow bot!
This seems like a solid and enjoyable base. A little extra would go a long way to adding interest to the game and it's tracks. Maybe boost (or bounce!) pads on the tracks, maybe some items to pick up or interactive environment pieces to set traps.
Viewing post in Retro Racing: Double Dash jam comments
Thanks for the great feedback! I completely agree with you, although I kinda like the jankyness of the collisions :P
You’re right that the traction physics model complicates things a little. I tried to workaround it by checking how much the new velocity is aligned with the car’s forward vector and if it’s sufficiently aligned I just replace the old velocity with the new one, otherwise I add the new velocity. I probably just need to think about this harder to come up with a better solution.
You’re totally right about the bots, of course. That’s just lazyness on my part: they are all exactly the same so once you learn how to beat them it’s very easy and not so fun. I will fix them for the next version.
I like your idea of having an interactive environment but I’m planning to eventually be able to have fully procedural tracks and I don’t know if I can do both. The boost thing, I totally agree. Also, I will eventually add elevation but 3D math is hard for me and I wanted to simplify things as much as I could :)