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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.

collisions are kinda bugged actually, I made the collision meshes for the guardrails and tunnels walls wrong so the car can get fucked up if you try to wallride. gotta rebuild those but it was low on the priority list for this demo day

interesting that you say desert speedway is medium-hard, my level of difficulty is miscalibrated then. I have some no-collide banner checkpoints that I’ll drop in there instead to make it a little easier on people.

boost is intended to be a tool for ending a drift like you mentioned, but I just tuned it to be a one-shot thing. i want to add another car in the future that boosts a little differently, like either in shorter bursts or just for as long as you hold it.

yeah the camera thing could also use some work. it’s annoying trying to get it to not clip into the track when it’s trying to follow the car, but following it better as the car is drifting will be part of my camera code rework in the next update as well. the change in following behavior when the car is drifting is legacy code from when it drifted differently a while back, and now it doesn’t look towards the car’s velocity enough.

faster speed = wider road is always good. it’s difficult to strike a good balance between accessibility and a sense of speed because wider roads seem to go by more slowly, although I could always just add little details on the tarmac or some shit to whoosh overhead.

the steering is actually still pretty open to change. an issue I realized today is that the altered behavior for drifting is still in 100% effect as the car transitions back from a drift to fullgrip, which can cause weird overcorrections as you’re straightening out of a turn.

thanks again for the detailed comments, hopefully I can fix all this by the next DD

thanks for playing! next level button is actually a very good idea to help you stay in that flow state. I’m gonna add some easier tracks in an upcoming update too.

Playing on keyboard is insane, I tried it and it was awful. You should be able to see all the prompts in the tutorial level though.

I’ve also played a ton of Trackmania, but mostly Stadium and Canyon. Canyon had a lot of drifting on narrow roads through tight corners which might have made me skew the tracks in this demo way harder.

I’m curious for difficulty, what do you think would be a good baseline? Something like the Desert Speedway track which is fairly wide but has a couple tighter turns? Or something even more relaxed? The average track difficulty here is definitely higher than it would be in the final game.

Thanks for playing, and for the very detailed feedback. I have an automatic shifting mode that will be in the next update.

yeah, the next step for UX would just be caching the times and updating them on-demand as the player ghosts update. that’ll be in a future update but I’m focusing on content and adding auto shifting for now.

Doing several races at the hard turns wasn’t enough to get nitro that way, I guess I need to do micro drifts too?

You also have to rev-match your shifts to maximize performance and nitro gain. If you get off the gas while upshifting it gives the revs time to fall down to about where they’d be at the lower gear ratio. And if you blip the gas while you have the clutch in and you’re downshifting, it will do the same thing in reverse. Those both give you nitro based on how well you did them.

Also yes, for hot lap tracks the intent is that you restart while already holding clutch and launch with no countdown because you haven’t actually started the hot lap yet. Maybe I should revisit that UX.

yeah, X (on an xbox controller) is quick restart. You have to hold clutch if you’re in stickshift mode but in paddle it’s just pressing X. also that’s a really good idea on the RS click for going to neutral, that’ll definitely be in the next update. Thanks for playing!

thanks for the detailed feedback, especially if you’re not a racing game person

• in the tutorial, you might have missed a checkpoint on one of your runs
• nitro is the meter in the bottom right, and is filled by drifting. you can only boost when the needle is in the blue and you see that blue triangle [!] sign on the nitro dial
• drifting is started by tapping handbrake (A on controller) and turning
• engine shutoff can happen in two ways:

1. engine RPM drops below the stall RPM, usually meaning you were in a non-neutral gear with the clutch out and no gas
2. engine over-revs past the redline, which can happen if you exit a loop at a high speed in a low gear or downshift when the car is going too fast

• yeah, I should maybe be more clear about the exit to menu vs. exit to desktop buttons
• when you restart it puts you in first gear, you have to give it gas when you let out the clutch or else the engine stalls and shuts off
• the medals are all loaded in parallel on-demand when you go the main menu by loading your ghost and looking at its time vs my times. this makes the main menu load faster because you don’t have to wait for the medals to load, but has the drawback of medal pop-in as the file i/o finishes
• you’re right, I should revisit the air -> ground transition since it might immediately switch back to full drift control which isn’t great
• I will add a baby tutorial and more baby tracks in the next update

thanks for playing!

thanks for the stream! I think I need to do a better tutorial, you’re supposed to tap A to drift and gain nitro

yeah I’m definitely gonna add an automatic, it’ll be nerfed by the fact that you can’t gain nitro from perfect shifts but it’ll make the game not-unplayable at the start lool

very very solid movement foundation, reminded me a bit of playing Dustfall but way more accessible. the only thing that felt hard to execute and a little bit hard to work into the rest of the flow was the wallkick - it feels like it’s only good to start off a speedrun or if you’re changing directions as you drop down or something.

still, mastering the rocket jump was very fun, and I appreciate that the weapons felt different. walljump was shorter than I expected but I got used to it

oh yeah, that’s the royalty-free menu music I used. not sure why it’s getting copyright flagged since i got it cc0 off pixabay but whatever. thank you so much for playing and for the video, I definitely need to split out the tutorial stuff more but you kinda nailed the tutorial track in the second video you posted. the last two turns were absolutely made for drifting

I actually tried that originally, to do some camera movement stuff. It was kinda slow but the main problem was that if the car was going over bumps or had a couple wheels in the gutter it would go crazy.

I tried a bandaid where I would average it over the last couple frames but then I realized I could just use the car’s local up vector.

Oh yes, that’s definitely a big part of it. I didn’t touch on it here but the springs’ compression is affected by the normal force in an emergent way via Unity’s physics.

Remember my last post about collider hell? That was because the springs were too weak. When the car was climbing a hill and slamming into a curve (or taking a banked curve, or a loop, any concave surface at high speed) the normal force was compressing the springs past their limit and the car’s body was scraping the ground.

So yes, it’s in the equation, just implicitly and not in a way that I need to calculate explicitly at runtime. I can just look at the springs’ compression and get an idea of it.

i do too…Vapor Trails was straight up unrealistic to make given the fact that I’m one guy with a day job.

Neodrive was/is a WAY more manageable project. i could just release it as-is but I want to have some more tracks and assets. it’s basically done minus like a dozen campaign tracks. I only dropped it because this new project seems very cool and I wanted to be a part of it.

Here’s what it looked like -

I already removed it and don’t want to revert back to an old commit, but the collider arrangement on the car looked like this. In the front, there was the sideways high bumper to compensate for the failing suspension, then two tubes on either side, and then a shorter one in the middle for the roofline. It made the car very willing to jump the track walls and completely screw up a run.

My wheels send raycasts down, by the suspension travel distance, in the shape of the tires. Then the nearest hit, if there is one, is taken as the ground contact point. The advantage to this is that you can also get the ground normal if the car is on a slight slope.

Also yes, the default wheel colliders are so annoying. I guess that’s the case for a lot of built-in systems. They’re good for tech demos and prototyping but eventually you’re going to want to build your own. I don’t know how I would have done the hydroplane mechanics without making my own wheels.

I actually explored some other alternatives when I was developing a prototype for this game back in like 2022. They all sucked.