Note the Almost. I had hoped to have a small working demo at this point, but was delayed in my endeavors by some things taking much longer than I had anticipated. Foiled by grass!
I was trying to get “physical” grass pieces to work, and it looked really good… on some computers. The problem was that on other computers it made everything run so slow that flying was no longer fun. Eventually the idea came around to fake the grass effect with a shader, simply playing a texture across the surface. Sounds simple? Well, it took me a few days, and it’s still got a long way to go.
Through continued testing, it would seem that the current flight system is incredibly intuitive and easy-to-use, but it doesn’t allow the flexibility we’d like as far as gameplay is concerned. So, we’re working on implementing a more “advanced flight system”, which the player can choose to use or not. It will be a bit more physics based, with the ability to do things like loop-the-loop, “do a barrel roll”, etc. Hopefully that will be drawn out more in the next few weeks.
Speaking of drawing, here’s some more beautiful concept art by Cesar (https://www.instagram.com/ceredartist/):
As we move forward, there’s some things like the structure of the game that we’ve had to change, unfortunately, for practical reasons. Originally the idea had been to have different “biomes”, and each “biome” or “zone”, would be a massive map, with various races in it, so you could do them without having to jump back to a level select scree, it’d be more immersive, you could fly around and explore, etc. But things like finding the starting points of races across the map, getting bored by flying from place to place, having to have a system to show which rings belong to the race you’re racing and not another race in the area, have made us decide to just go with a level select system, where each race is a separate level.
I’m really sorry to lose some of that open-world aspect, but sacrifices must be made for the sake of scope. What things are so important to the game that we need to invest the time in getting them right, and what things are extra?
That’s not a bad thing to think about for life either…