FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD41 → Spur of the Moment Racing

Spur of the Moment Racing

By gemberkoekje

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall4083.2926
Fun4823.0426
Innovation1133.8126
Theme364.3025
Graphics5202.8025
Audio4272.5624
Humor4342.3824
Mood5912.4522

Comments

danby 2018-04-23 07:51

Cool idea and concept ai like the racer tracks

fashionbatman 2018-04-23 07:55

Great job! All the cars bouncing into each other and drifting around was hilarious!

gemberkoekje 2018-04-23 07:59

@danby Thanks :) @fashionbatman Yeah, the AI is pretty laughable at times XD - I hope to have some time post-compo, I'd love to do some machine learning on this thing, let the AI flesh out itself!

potondo 2018-04-23 08:00

This game is really fun! A very neat concept.

Just a minor point, but I found the checkpoints a bit too big and felt they obstructed the course a bit too much, especially some of the green at some of the curves. I also wish you could control the steering, gas, and brakes with keys instead of the mouse, just to make the game loop a bit faster. Just nitpicks really.

Great work!

aterlamia 2018-04-23 08:04

Great game, i think it fits the theme pretty well. And i do like the "prediction" of your next turn else it would be very hard to actually play this.

gemberkoekje 2018-04-23 08:06

@potondo Thanks! For a post-compo version I want to do bezier curves, so that the whole grass&checkpoint issue is a bit less. The reason they are so big is because otherwise you'd get really annoyed at sharp-ish corners. I'll put controlling with keys on my post-compo to do list as well, great idea and thanks for playing!

ysty 2018-04-23 10:18

Really nice use of the theme. It turns out even with all the time in the world I still suck at racing games :P

andreadbx 2018-04-23 11:14

Very innovative and fun entry! i think this could be even better with the feature to plan like 2 moves in a row :D

gemberkoekje 2018-04-23 11:36

@Andreadbx Is already on my post-compo to do list, but yes! Thanks!

eddynardo 2018-04-23 11:59

Wow, this was really fun to play, everything was fine until I crashed on another car XD I loved the future prediction and the way the AI works is really funny!!! great job

ragnta 2018-04-23 12:21

I had have the same idea when I heard about the theme of LD. Unfortunatelly, I didn't design that, but I am very happy, because others can do it! Nice job!

gemberkoekje 2018-04-23 12:58

@ragnta Honestly, I've wanted to make this game for a long time. This LD & theme just gave me the perfect excuse to actually take the time to make it. And I'm glad I did!

niborious 2018-04-23 16:33

Really cool game. It would be cool if there were some smaller tracks to start new players off on. The races seem pretty long right now, and its hard to keep up for 3 laps around a long track.

the-icy-one 2018-04-23 19:22

The tracks are quite fun, but as @niborious mentioned, 3 laps are a little long for what feels like a casual game to pick up and play, since that works out to about 150 simulations at minimum. The AI dodgems at the start of the game was also surprisingly exciting once I had the hang of the controls.

vkmicro 2018-04-24 03:58

I was looking to Turn based racing game(s) to come from this theme and here's the first 1 :D

This was super fun and i really enjoyed the projection of what your car will do based on the changes you make next turn. very cool mechanic

my only issue I had with the game is, the car you control does NOT stand out at all! One key thing about game design is making your character stand out, so that's the only suggestion i have for you honestly, make the player controlled character stand out from the others.

Other than that, super cool, very fun, very engaging and interesting. I definitely enjoyed this. Nice sound effects too and my favorite part is the projection of your cars movement next turn!

gemberkoekje 2018-04-24 08:33

@niborious @the-icy-one Thanks for your feedback. The basic issue is that the tracks are randomly generated, and I simply didn't think about creating a track with less nodes. One of my plans is a level editor, and then it'll be easy to make a simpler track!

@vkmicro One of my plans was different skins for the cars, but I ran out of time T_T. At least it's reasonably obvious from the fact that you're the only one extruding a ghost car, but I do agree that a simple circle under the car or anything would've been even more clear. Thanks for the feedback!

darylsteak 2018-04-24 14:04

This was really fun and I enjoyed it very much, the only trouble was other cars crashing into each other, but that only adds to the experience. I also like that you had to plan ahead and anticipate how your car was going to move during each turn.

Overall, loved it

mrspeaker 2018-04-24 14:44

This worked surprisingly well! I kind of wish it was keyboard driven instead of mouse - I found that because it was annoying to constantly adjust the sliders I just stuck with modifying left and right - with gas full and break 0. If the sliders were keyboard controlled it would better.

Also, that music loop was a bit insane - though I have a sneaking suspicion it was composed by Math.random...

Those points aside - fantastic idea... I played this game for wayyy too long, and I think it's something you should keep building on!

gemberkoekje 2018-04-24 17:50

@Darylsteak Improving the AI would be one of my post-compo points, they're really dumb right now XD Thanks for the feedback!

@mrspeaker It's already on the list of post-compo points, so I'll definetly make a new version with some more keyboard controls. The music was made with the abundant music tool (see the original post) but I wanted to be high-tempo and arcadey. I succeeded in making it high-tempo! Thanks for the feedback!

tomeks 2018-04-25 05:26

Like the idea and actual gameplay. One way to improve the enemy AI is to actually prerecord the sequences of moves of you playing the track its a lot of manual labour but gives decent result. Or use machine learning but it will take some time to set it up. Well done.

gemberkoekje 2018-04-25 15:53

@TomekS That could work.. if my levels aren't all randomly generated (The 4 levels are simply based on a specific seed which made relatively-nice levels) and I prioritized other stuff for the weekend... For the post-compo though I really have some ideas how to make the AI really cool! Thanks for playing!

alferbayter 2018-04-30 21:22

Really innovative! The mouse controls were a bit clunky, would've preferred to use the keyboard. Very nice idea with the ghost car for showing the expected path.