The jam ratings went live today!

We're super proud of our wee game, but here are some reflections now that the jam is over and we've had plenty of feedback!

We grew used to the controls during our two weeks of constant internal playtesting, but didn’t teach them well enough to new players. People said once they got used to the controls they had a great time drifting around, but there was a steep learning curve.

I ended up posting a hotfix to remove the lose conditions, as people weren’t able to complete the game. The idea was if every other ghost driver reached the checkpoint before you that you’d fallen too far behind and had to retry from the last checkpoint. Now you can keep trying forever, which helps people to focus on having fun with the driving + movement and listening to the narrative.

Don’t leave all your level design to the last minute. I’m still super proud of our track designs considering this fact, but it was way too stressful and could have had plenty of time for iteration otherwise.

It’s done!!

The main feature left for me to work on today were the… Ghost paths!!! I went through all 26 tracks in the game and recorded each racer - each with their own personality and movement quirks! It was actually pretty fun, if a bit tedious. Luckily racers drop out of the race one by one (oop spoilers) so my workload steadily lightened as I reached the end of the day.

Otherwise it was just putting the final touches on everying, last minute tweaks, polish, etc

I’m super proud of what we were able to accomplish in these two weeks of part time development though!! Check it out yourself on itch here; https://johnjoemcbob.itch.io/psifrost

Today was a whole bunch of level design work! Don’t leave your 26 tracks worth of levels to be designed on the second last day of development, folks! To combat this we split the segments between those of us with Unity editor knowledge (and Emmy, who learned, thanks Emmy!) It was still a ton of work and I was in charge of 99% of the terrain work (since that doesn’t merge well via source control) but here we are! All 26 levels are laid out.

Tomorrow I’ll be going through the long process of recording all the ghost paths for these tracks!! For once my job really will be to play video games all day.

Sid car models
Caspar road iterations
My Green VO

So much to show here! We’re on a new slope test map, with chain assets provided by Caspar

Emmy implemented the checkpoint & dialogue systems - I believe these were actually her first foray into Unity development so well done Emmy!
This is the first change we’ve gotten to show off the different characters from Cat’s narrative, now in the game! There’s a whole 26 act story to voice and implement, though for now I just did some quick recordings for all the characters heard here. It was super important to us to have these fully voiced as players simply won’t be able to concentrate on reading text boxes while high speed drifting down mountain tracks. I had a lot of fun trying to do different accents! Though Green is definitely my favourite here, and going forward we’ll be spliting up the acting a lot more. We’re using FMOD for all the audio and I’m really happy with the radio style effect I was able to create.

The ghosts are further implementation by me, linking the old ghost system to the checkpoint system so they spawn in each “act” of the race as you cross that checkpoint. These are recorded in game by simply driving around as normal (it just stores out a bunch of positions, angles, & velocities as a .json)

As you can see it’s immediately looking much brighter and readible, thanks to an aesthetic colour pass by Caspar

I was implementing actual drifting today, so when the player holds drift they skid and turn dramatically. This adds a lot to the feel of the game and gives the player more control when it comes to deciding how harshly to turn.
This is heightened by these wonderful trail particles by Autumn. Again really selling the speed of the thing.
I also love the camera barely keeping up with the intense turns here - but at the same time never losing track of the player or making play hard. Really happy with it!

With sound effects from Autumn & amazing music by Emmy!!

One of the great things about the length of Rainbow Jam is that its specifically designed to avoid people overworking. So! It’s been a few days. I spent a few hours here and there tweaking things but let’s have a look at today’s meaningful progress.

Aesthetic tests! We’re using the FlatKit shader plugin for Unity. I tried to colour match the concept art provided by Caspar & attempted to approximate Sid’s vehicle designs with some basic primitives to get this first feel for the game’s look.

Day 2 saw more work on the vehicle physics + controls! I prototyped the first iteration on the drifting/turbo mechanic; currently if you turn at high speed it counts as a drift and builds turbo. This turbo can then be used at will to go fast!

The turbo bar UI is world space so I can have it jiggle around and stretch to add to the speed effects. I’ve also been heavily focusing on the camera logic; its a simple follow camera with no player input but I’m adding a lot of distance/fov lerping to really help sell the speedy movement too.

Today marks the start of Rainbow Jam 2021! The jam lasts two weeks and is always a blast. I’ve been participating since the original in 2016!

Our first day began with a long brainstorming call. I’ll be working in a team with friends for the jam, and we came up with this idea for a queer hover racing game!

I then got stuck in on the first iteration of the car physics while I wait for the job-havers on the team to have some free time to work on this.
I also did some very quick prototypes for ghost drivers. We decided on ghost recordings to compete against to avoid having to try and design racing AI within the two week project scope.

Full team; Autumn, Caspar, Cat, Emmy, Sid
There are a lot of us so we should be able to manage this larger scope!