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I will probably finish VT physics at some point, but it will be a much smaller game than I originally intended (which is to say, still about 6 hours or so)

Hi, EngineSim isn’t my creation. You’ll have to look at the license and usage terms in the repo that I linked.

As far as my own code goes, you’re welcome to use it for whatever. The repo is private right now but I dropped the EngineAudio class into this Github Gist. It’s CC-0 licensed, so you can do whatever you want with it.

Speed splits are how fast you were going when you passed that checkpoint on your lap record. You can see them in the screenshot above the time.

People were asking for them in the discord, since it can give more information about how the player is doing relative to a previous run.

Here’s a behind-the-scenes video of me making an experimental track if you’re interested.

scope was too big, I might revisit it in a couple years tho

After being disappointed with a lot of free spline deformation tools, I bought and have been pretty satisfied with a Unity asset called Spline Architect to basically do what you’ve described. The workflow is:

1. Make the track spline
2. Copy the track meshes along it
3. Play, tweak the shape, repeat
4. Add scenery

It’s nice because it’s a non-destructive workflow and I can alter the spline and just have the track change to follow it. I don’t have a level editor built into the game yet though, it’s all just in the Unity editor itself. I will probably record a devlog of an end-to-end process of developing a track at some point to show what that’s like and my thought processes while designing it.

Managing DLC for both Steam and non-Steam builds would be kind of a nightmare, unfortunately. I will probably launch in Early Access with 1/3 to 1/2 of the tracks made and have the game heavily discounted until it hits 1.0.

Thanks for the kind words. I do want to come back to VT someday with a more realistic scope.

In the meantime, however, I am working on another smaller game (Neodrive) as well as an unnanounced 2D metroidvania with a group of people. It’s got a cool premise, some sick art, and of course some movement and gameplay programmed by yours truly. We will announce it later this year.

thank you!

ah got it, thank you. I was actually wishing it would be nice to be able to navigate the UI with the controllers - maybe it was working, but the buttons weren’t changing appearance on hover/select. good luck with development!

Pretty cool, definitely the bones of something good. I played some of the gate race events and the race, which took me a few tries to win.

• camera felt a little wonky, would be nice if it was following the car on smoothed axes instead of just being parented to the car
• the different handling on mud was cool, and I liked some of the mud placements. like initially I thought the mud on the outside of the mid level of the last turn before the finish line was too much, but if you can thread the needle it’s very satisfying
• rally car seems goated
• cliffhanger takedowns could really use a camera showing the NPC falling off instead of from the track
• respawning needs a gamepad button, I couldn’t find one
• some other effects for when you’re on mud would be nice
• you need more props for sure, the Godot terrain pop-in is rough
• i feel like all the cars could have bouncier suspension too honestly, or if you even fake bounce the wheels up and down to make the ground seem bumpier
• cars could use a little more stabilization when hitting the curved edges of bumpy terrain or getting rammed without getting KO’d
• getting crushed by a monster truck was cool
• despite criticisms it was genuinely fun to play around with and worth trying to get 1st on the race

I think if you’re trying to sell it for money you gotta have a lot more sauce. more explosions and parts and shit flying off. bumping and getting bumped around by other drivers is pretty fun already. cool to see another indie racer in the works

Yo thanks for playing! Unfortunately I haven’t worked on this game in several years and likely won’t for a while. For now, you’ll have to just adjust the global volume. A dialogue volume slider would be a good idea though.

Hmm, weird. I’ll ask a friend with Linux to give it a try before the next demo.

I will also add gold time overrides. I wanted to set a competitive author time for tracks, but that results in a really hard gold time on early tracks where I want to reward the player with an early gold medal.

Also yes. I will fix my tire slip model in the future. Thanks for playing.

oh man, that framerate is ROUGH haha. I’ll make another pass with optimization, at the very least turning down motion blur might help in the future. Thanks for playing!

Paddle shifting mode just uses L1 and R1 to switch gears, without any holding L1 and moving RS. You don’t need to do the Manual tutorial if you have that enabled, but I should definitely make it clearer. Thanks for giving it a try!

My mistake. I accidentally unbound the cycle camera button in the keyboard controls. It’s in Camera > Cycle Camera in the keybind settings.

There are ways to get around the arrow issue that I haven’t implemented. One potential way is to make the steering input “heavy” so you have to hold a direction for half a second or whatever to pull the input all the way left or right.

Another way that I practiced a lot with Trackmania is just rapidly tapping the arrows. But I think Trackmania physics are balanced around that, whereas Neodrive is not.

Much further down the line, I will probably add other cars that are more forgiving to drive on keyboard.

VR Speed Racer sounds sickening. I played BallisticNG in VR with the cockpit view once and got too nauseated to keep playing.

thanks for playing!

• will definitely show all times next update, good call
• yes
• yeah, ghosts are for down the line if this game actually gets traction somewhere. some of the code already supports multiple ghosts
• eh, people like playing the trackmania campaigns even solo. maybe audiences are different now but who knows, this does have the advantage too of not being a subscription model
• the speedracer/hot wheels tracks are usually harder but I should make some more forgiving ones that still have loops and shit, yes
• there’s a first person camera, it’s up on the d-pad. not sure what I bound it to on keyboard but you can check in the keys menu
• steer control as in you needed more when not drifting?
• you should boost it’s fun

numpad numbers to shift gear is insane though, if that strat worked for you then hell yeah. especially if you don’t drive you’re a madman

that’s chill. it was super atmospheric, i like the music and art you chose. after a while I did start to feel like I was lost down there

picked up the movement tech very quickly, although I’d suggest adding a fastfall binding like Z or something, it gets awkward having to switch my middle finger up and down like that.

I wish there was more traction on the ground, but I respect it if you want to keep it like that too, it’s definitely doable. the roll especially out of a fastfall bounce felt WAY too fast and hard to control though. still, very charming artstyle

I was able to just cheese that by wedging myself in the crevice between the two boulders and jumping out of that

almost completely incomprehensible but vibes are unparalleled. love the art, and I was starting to get the sword swinging/stuck weapon mechanic at the end. cool little touches like the teddy bear pillow attack filling the screen when you get hit by it.

i never figured out the jump mechanic though - is it on a meter that needs to recharge or something? sometimes i was able to jump higher than normal and sometimes I wasn’t able to jump at all.

choosing a faith at the beginning is a really funny touch, I enjoyed that. combat was very slow but didn’t feel terrible to me, at least in third person - the different directional strokes based on where you were aiming was cool, if a bit unintuitive in first person. in first person I feel like a mouse gesture would make more sense, but I realize that’s way harder to code.

cool graphics though, very reminiscent of a certain era. I went into the basement without the torch and opened the door and started falling into the skybox, so I guess that was the end of the level

played fire and earth realms, pretty cool but seemed a little bit grindy without much risk. gameplay loop seemed to be orbiting around things and blipping at them with your primary to get a stat up. the weapon cycling was neat, and having unlimited ammo is nice too. also the special attacks are cool, big fan of the akira orbital laser. i never felt like I had to use the shift dodge except to get somewhere faster.

not sure what the point of pressure was until I realized it seems to just keep you from flying over the entire level at the start

maybe I need to revisit it and do some harder levels

seems like a boomer shooter trying to be an imsim almost. enemy movement is interesting but it doesn’t seem like you have the same kind of strategic tools to deal with the generic ooga booga spearchucking savages. definitely a chudgame in that you get the power fantasy of shooting subhumans with your semiautomatic firearm with a mandatory explicit reload. gun dork stuff fell short though imo because you keep all the bullets left in your magazine if you reload halfway through, and the pistol reload is fast enough that there’s no point in doing anything but reloading after each kill

surprisingly charming. got all bones big and small. I like how some of the last ones felt like you had to push the movement system to its limits, like getting up the pillar with the balcony halfway up and the overhang that made me need to jump to the side of the sloped roof since it was lower.

really cool art, can’t say I care for the darkest dungeon style gameplay that much but some of the visuals are very very polished. definitely needs max hp/mana indicators though.

kinda cool, I liked the assassinations more than anything. there doesn’t seem to be any penalty to running in and killing though since you can just dodge and eat one of your 200 bananas.

one thing that was cool was the enemy in the onsen level that had the frame data to push you back if you spammed attack too much though.

lots of chain lightning and spamming rest in between fights. not sure what the actual gameplay loop was like, but pretty cool. these dungeons are way too big for me to be using graph paper man

really unforgiving indeed, but it’s ok because the controls are for the most part very very tight and polished. i do not like levels with the moving platforms especially if they don’t reset between deaths, it always feels like a gamble.

also I kept getting locked in on a level and then forgetting what the game was like and getting Pussy Jumpscared when I finished. not sure what the target audience is - people who are horny but also want to be pissed off? pretty fun regardless

also, one of the early levels where you have to loop 3 times and jump down through the portal to the top seemed way harder and maybe should be a later level. nice art though

pretty fun, I like the bullet parrying and the hat collecting mechanic if you’re low on health. good hotline miami-like. also sick music

right now there’s not much of a reason to parry if you can just dodge forward and right through everything. I parried a few times and clashed maybe once by accident and managed to just hit them for vitality until I could start doing persistent posture damage and didn’t use any of the gadgets because their startup time was very long. beat all bosses except the last one which I haven’t tried yet. I guess if people start blocking you want to just use gadgets but I didn’t see many downsides to just spamming attack and dodging when necessary early in the fight.

pretty cool though for furry sekiro even if some of the bosses are for coomers. attacks are well telegraphed for the most part too.

definitely a game for a certain type of person who likes anime girls and tanks. cool visuals, but that was about all of what did it for me

google drive access denied. shame, I was looking forward to playing it after the success of Interrogator 1

was initially unsure what the point of it all was but it’s surprisingly compelling. definitely doable if you have the patience

thanks for playing! even more respect since it’s not your thing. i definitely need to add more to the tutorial as another playtester commented. doing clutch for your first run is also deranged though, props.

you can quick restart by holding clutch and pressing X (on an xbox controller) or just X if you’re not in clutch shifting mode.

yo thanks so much for the stream and the comments, I have a bunch of stuff to change based on this but I’ll also respond here

• selecting the first track in a stage when selecting Tutorial or Stage 1 would be good yes
• revmatching an upshift is weird terminology yeah, I just needed something that would be similar meaning-wise to revmatching a downshift
• you can use your rig for it! I’ve tested it on my buddy’s logitech rig (Edit I see you got it working but there’s still some weirdness, sorry about that. each one is different and the sens range on one wheel might not work on another. weird that it didn’t detect your brake pedal though?
• it is a lot with your fingers lol, you gotta be fast. I did intend it to be a little weird though because it’s weird IRL. I personally prefer playing on the controller.
• the next button in the tutorial should be selected by default though, that makes sense
• the heel toe tutorial detector is a little too strict, I should make it detect the heel toe you did
• you can use the d-pad to go left and right in the tutorials, i should really add prompts for that
• holy shit i autohide the cursor but didn’t realize it would do that and then not unhide when timescale is 0, i need to fix that
• I should show a button prompt for the nitro, i noticed you weren’t using it
• dumping the clutch to do a burnout would be SICK actually. the issue is that I need to balance the tire grip, they’re currently insanely grippy so the car can accelerate fast but i gotta turn that off somehow
• i gotta add a prompt for restarting in the tutorial
• also gotta add a prompt for handbrake drifting in the interactive tutorial
• need to change respawn to restart
• need to say nitro resets on completing a hot lap
• nitro upshifts you automatically, I should say that. it’s hard because otherwise you would immediately over-rev the engine when boosting, and fucking with the gear ratios while boosting actually felt really bad to play no matter how much i tweaked it
• damn i’m watching your last video now and you did improve a lot. but maybe that means i need to raise the skill floor of the tracks too. i guess part of it was the technical issues I detailed above
• i left comments on the videos at timestamps, mostly compliments but some answers

thanks again for all these videos man, not cringe at all. if anything I was cringing seeing you hit stuff I didn’t notice existed. let me know if you want me to put you in the credits for helping playtest

way too many changes since the last DD to list here, but these are the big ones:

• added more tracks
• added a manual tutorial
• added an automatic mode
• made some tracks easier
• made some arcade handling stuff more consistent
• improved performance
• added a replay viewer
• made the third-person camera follow the car correctly on loops

You need to tap handbrake for that. I don’t remember what I set as the default for it with keyboard, I think Z.

You can check it in the keybind settings from the main menu.

I found some cc0 audio on freesound.org (or maybe it was in some giant sound asset pack I bought for $15 years ago) of a car skidding and then crashing into a barrier. I extracted just the skidding part and used the One Simple Trick of turning a somewhat homogeneous sound into a loop with Audacity:

1. Cut the sound in the middle, into two parts
2. Move the second part before the first part
3. Select an area around the border of the first and second part
4. Effect -> Crossfade Clips
5. Do the 0 volume treatment to avoid clipping

and that’s it, it was one of the easiest sounds to make. I should update the post with that too

Vapor Trails was complicated for a few reasons:

• combat was way more complex, with enemy behaviors for tech rolling, dodging, parrying, etc
• I coded a lot of the movement stuff poorly and was fighting with the physics engine
• feature creep

The mobility tech in VT would be pretty simple to remake at this point, and be way more robust, because of the skills I’ve gained working on an unannounced other professional project. It’s also a 2D game with some cool movement.

Maybe things also just get simpler as I code more.