Too late, you notice the tell-tale glint of a laser designator dancing across your visual sensors as you cross an empty intersection at high speed. A tire-shredding cluster munition is surely inbound. You drift hard to the north and pop smoke. Hopefully you can break their lock with a detour through the crowded night-market ahead and still make it to the exit with your package intact.

RUNTIME is a sequel to last year’s runner. Like the original, RUNTIME is a continuation of my interest in non-combat games. This time instead of having “moves” I wanted to make an expressive-enough input system that had emergent moves in it. More on how that will work on future days.

I did my first devlog over on reddit yesterday. Linking here for completeness!

Images and video

Today was vehicles day! What are city streets without traffic?

I built:

• A basic pedestrian entity, that uses a simple nav-mesh system. I place invisible entities that pedestrians look up to decide where to move to.
• Added multi-part vehicles.
• Intersections, with stop lights and a working “cycle” system.
• A vehicle “consumer” that deletes vehicles nearby who get off track.

My level design collaborator filled in the remaining holes in the generator block types for roads.

I spent a lot of the day on a mistake – I thought I wanted vehicles to spawn in continuously from “deadends” in the road network. There was a certain logic to this. It turned out to be both tricky to implement (the multi-tile vehicles are finicky) and when I got it working, the streets were just flooded with traffic. Plus it made me realize that the actual network itself needed to be coherent; there could be no loops. All traffic needed to move from a source to a sink reliably.

Over dinner, I was bemoaning my poor planning to my son and as always rubber-ducking my problem made me realize my error. What if I simply … baked the vehicles into the road tiles themselves. It’s not quite as systematic. But turned out to be a lot easier and a lot more reliable.

So I exited the day with roughly what I was aiming for. A working vehicle system that the player can interact with dynamically.

Next Up

The days go fast! My high level modules left are:

• Enemies + “death”
• Player movement tuning (and add energy system)
• Player abilities
• Objectives + success
• Multiple levels
• UI polish (minimap?)
• Tutorialization??

More of those than I have days left. But I think many of these will be less than a day to do. Tomorrow is probably Enemies and “death.”

This looks very interesting. I loved runner, and I'd love to see where you're taking this.

The antagonist has arrived! In RUNTIME you’re hunted from the skies by an automated drone. Spend too much time in its spotlight and it will disable your robot and end your run.

For anyone who remembers runner from last year, you will recall the HUNTER. It chased you through the sub-basements of a corporate tower. The HELI this year has a number of advantages: it can fly anywhere, move almost as fast as you, and move diagonally. But it has a problem: it doesn’t know where you are. If any enemies manage to get a “lock” on you, they give HELI your location to come lock you down.

The CAMS are stationary but plentiful. Try to avoid their watchful eye!

When a BOOMER picks up your scent, it runs at you and explodes, leaving behind impassable terrain and usually causing a crash.

TURRETs are stationary but have a variety of munitions to ruin your day: EMP clouds (above), caltrop zones, oil slicks, and smoke screens.

The bottom right corner now hosts a mini-map that shows an abstract view of the city (incidentally, re-using my city generator models as a UI) with fog of war and indicators for the player, the HELI, and (soon) objective locations.

Overall – highly productive day. I should have swapped my day 2 and day 3 work. Getting enemies (especially the HELI antagonist) built feels really important for having something playable. I can start to feel the game now. I don’t know if it’s good but there’s something in there.

Next Up

To really close out the core gameplay loop, I need objectives. I think this is going to be special vehicles that wander the city that you need … bump? … to steal their cargo. Let’s say 3 objectives per level, you gotta get them all, and then make it to an exit point on the edge of the map. This should be relatively straightforward. The main thing I don’t have a plan for is the “steal” action. I guess bumping is the main verb at the moment, so we’ll just do that.

Then I will switch to movement tuning. The movement has to feel SO smooth and it’s far from that point. I want to add an energy system to limit turbo usage, fix some input buffering issues, fix the “drift” marks, make braking actually work (or remove it), and tune some bits of the low-speed logic. This is all vibes. Not normal roguelike work, but I’m enjoying these really micro input considerations.