Lowrezjam 2020 entry: F-Z

 

 
 
This evening I submitted F-Z, my entry for Lowrezjam2020.

I was going to make a helicopter game, but in 64x64 pixels I just couldn't get anything to actually look like a helicopter!  So I completely changed my mind and made an F-Zero style racer instead.

In the limited time allowed for the jam, I only managed to make a single track.  However, the game was reasonably polished: it had a title-screen, menu, AI opponents, music, sound effects and a 'finished' race outro - with a particle effect for a podium place!

It was the first time I'd written a racing AI.  I basically baked the AI instructions into the track tilemap, giving each AI-sector a heading value.  The runtime code loaded the sector polygon and calculated a middle-line for the sector using the polygon vertices and the heading.  The runtime AI first checked if it was way off the heading for the sector and corrected for that.  If the heading was okay, it checked if it was too far off the sector's middle-line and adjusted for that.
 
The AI does have bugs in it, but it worked well enough for me to just submit it as-is.  I suspect problems lie in the middle-line correction.  Maybe I'll find time to go back and try fixing it.
 
I've put more info on the F-Z itch page about the tools I used in making the game.

Improvements I want to make include:
  • Choice of ships (with different speed/accel/handling/mass)
  • Multiple tracks (including each one in reverse)
  • More fleshed-out world, with off-track graphics
  • Grey 'high-friction' areas to avoid
  • Finite 'hull health', depleted by collisions
  • Finite 'boost', replenished each lap
  • Variation in AI, so the opponents don't all follow each other's moves so closely
  • Jump-pads and boost-pads 
  • Branching tracks
All in all, I'm really proud of my entry - especially the amount of polish I managed to put on it. 

Update: I finished 135th overall out of 369 entries.  Not too shabby!



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