Tire Fire Rally - Designing the Sky

    One of the admittedly attractive parts of making a racing game is how restricted the player is. Open worlds take a lot to fill, and as a one person studio, I don't have a lot of extra time to fill them. In a racing game, the player is pretty much trapped in the track. You can only do so much, or that was my mindset at the beginning of this project.

    My first test map for Tire Fire Rally was a basic oval with high crash walls, partially to keep the player from falling out of the track during a crash and partially to stop the player from seeing the vast, empty plane around them. It was easy to build and took no work on the background scenery to hide the horizon and I thought I had cleverly saved a huge amount of time, but I had a problem with it. I kept getting “lost” on the track. Not actually lost, it was a one lane loop after all, but I kept having trouble orienting myself, figuring out how far I'd gone, how fast I was moving, if I was anywhere near the finish line or not. You know, all the important parts of driving.

    Years ago, I watched a GDC talk about designing non-uniform hallways to keep the player from getting lost in the monotony. I also remember how the hospital hallways were painted up in wild colors and huge numbers on the wall when my kids were born. It helped the sleep deprived new parents not get lost when they wandered out for burnt coffee. My tracks needed landmarks, colors, non-uniformity to give the players some sense of space and direction. It’s not like the tracks on Hydro Thunder are that crazy for no reason.

    For starters, I've taken the crash walls down a little bit. The surrounding scenery might take more work, but it’s there for a reason. I've started to fill the tracks with stupid advertisements, billboards strapped over the track, speakers and cameras hanging into the roadway, unnecessary tunnels, buildings hulking in the background, palm trees lurking just outside the walls. Anything and everything that can flash in the corner of the players eyes and give them a marker. It’s been a lot of fun, somewhere in between writing jokes for Vice City radio and drawing a page for Where’s Waldo.

    It’s also been a nice reminder of what map design actually should boil down to. I personally like simulation games, and sometimes get bogged down in creating a functional simulated world that the player can also exist in, but this world is not like that. The only things that need to exist in this world are the cars, the track, and things directly visible from said track. And all the space visible from the track needs to be filled. It’s a reminder that buildings can stop whenever they fall out of sight and don't need to neatly fit into the ground. Birds don't need to have a fully modeled and textured top side. Crowds can be flat if the player only sees them from one side. It all only needs to look good and hang together from one specific angle, and all the rest can be loose wires and sharp corners.

    I don't think I have any more coherence to this thought. It’s just been fun designing a world in such a different way than I ever have before. And I guess I'm reminding myself that every time I think I am designing a project to avoid some kind of work, I will find a whole new kind to throw myself into.

    If you want to see some flat crowds for yourself, give Tire Fire Rally a wish list on Steam, and maybe spread the game around a bit. Get some other eyeballs on it.

Later.

 

Tire Fire Rally - Sports Cars in Traffic

    I'm going to be transparent, I didn't really start this game with any ethos in mind. The original note for the game said “A NASCAR game, but with stupid things on every lap.” But I have a lot of time alone with my thoughts while I'm actually building my stupid idea, and I’ve been going around and around trying to figure out why I wanted to make fun of racing in the first place.

    I’ve been advertising this game as a racing game being made by someone who hates driving, which is mostly true. I hate traffic, car maintenance, insurance, parking, pretending to care about dents and scratches, and of course, car payments. The day to day of owning and using a car is expensive and dull and I despise it, except for one month in 2020.

    That summer, my city was brought to a standstill between COVID, protests, and the presence of the National Guard. I had a job that kept me out a few hours past the curfew and left me driving through a completely deserted city covered in boards and bright protest graffiti with fucking armored Humvees sitting on the overpass. I fucking loved it. I would blast the soundtrack to JSFR and speed through my city at what would have been very dangerous speeds if anyone ever had been out. It is the only time in my life that driving actually felt like the “freedom” all the car companies try to sell it as, and I think that taste of how fun they could actually be made me paradoxically hate cars all the more.

    It really highlighted how we were building these machines with capabilities that had almost nothing to do with how they would be used. Super cars are engineered to handle above 120 mph and bluff emissions detectors only to idle in L.A. traffic for most of their lives. Trucks that can haul multiple tones of steel will move a couch once or twice if they're lucky. SUVs are built like they should be crouched on an overpass enforcing a curfew instead of shuttling kids back and forth. Using my car in the post-apocalyptic, cyberpunk city, it felt like it was a toy instead of an expensive and poor excuse for proper public transit, and I hate that I am paying to keep all these systems that we're designed for speed and agility that I will almost never reach in working order.

    I've also been playing a decent amount of racing games in my little bit of spare time. You know, for “research.” A lot of them treat cars like they're somewhere between religious icons and pornographic. They make them almost deities, which makes me want to act as an iconoclast. I wanted to take these machines that were built for non-existent stretches of open, perfectly maintained highways and race tracks and subject them to the drudgery of traffic, potholes, and toll booths. I think it’s the same instinct that made people tune into The Simple Life to see the disgustingly wealthy working a fast food job.

    That being said, a lot of the original ideas I wanted to throw into the game turned out to be very boring. It’s funny to see a Corvette in traffic, but not fun to be a Corvette in traffic. This is still a game after all. So, a lot of the obstacles got ratcheted up in weirdness. The current mood is a bit like taking fashion models and forcing them to run through a Wipeout course. I think that's close enough to my original notes. I wanted to make fun of the culture of racing and over engineering because it had virtually nothing to do with normal driving, started with frustrating realism, and ended up with something goofy and light hearted.

    If Wipeout with cars sounds cool to you, wish list the game on Steam before the demo comes out.

Tire Fire Rally - Flat Crowds

    I've been thinking recently (for obvious reasons) about a conversion I had with a friend almost 15 years ago about crowds in racing games. I can’t remember the games, but he was lecturing me about one of them being worse because the horrible, lazy developers just used 2D sprites to fill the crowd instead of making fully modeled people. At the time, I think I came down firmly on the side of “don't care.”

    There are so many little pieces of a game that players barely see for a frame or two, like the Halo 3 rat, that still need to be there, but just barely. It's not like the player is going to be chatting to the crowd. It's not The Sims of Fable. You will not marry any of these people (Don't look at the top right). So, after more than a decade I am agreeing with my idiot, teenage self again. These 2D, repetitive bastards are staying in the game, maybe getting some friends.

    The other side of my laziness is just the weird charm I feel from these older, much more jank games. I am still trying to figure out what it is, but I can't get over the trees, the ridiculous 2D bill-boarding trees in these old games. They're fantastic in a way that almost no properly modeled, high poly, shaded out trees are. It reminds me of the jump in video quality from film to digital when the technology first came out. Digital eventually caught up in quality, but the immediate jump was worse.

    There was a whole generation of developers who painstakingly drew out these pixely little trees. They mastered making these things look as beautiful and inviting as possible given the technological limitations. We jumped from these (Pictured right) to the Halo 1 Blood Gulch tree that had about six polygons, and while the trees in RDR2 and Battlefield 1 are not light years ahead of these palms, I still do love them.

    Thanks for reading my ramblings about 2D trees and copy/paste crowds. If you're interested in not seeing these people as you whip by, you can wishlist Tire Fire Rally here.

Micro Tutorial: Signals with Custom Events

 

    Custom Events are very important to my projects allowing all sorts of different triggers and scripts from all over the game to communicate specific information. So, I thought I'd go over quickly how they work.

    That red box in the first picture is just a trigger and tag comparison to make sure this script only fires when it is hit by the player. You can read more about that in a previous tutorial, then a cooldown to make sure the script doesn't fire multiple times when the player is entering the trigger once, but that's beside the point of this post. The last block is the important one here, the Custom Event - Trigger block. 

    I made this script to be flexible, as in applied to multiple triggers that will all need to send different messages to different places, which is why all the important information is in Object Variables. Being object specific, I can change the message and destination for each one without altering the original script. The message the trigger is supposed to send is connected with that orange line, and the destination where it is supposed to be sent it connected with the green line.

     In this second picture, you can see the Object Variables in the green box. So, we're sending the message "JokeTrigger" to the the target "DungeonKeeper" which is my scene manager. 

    The blue box is the receiving portion of the script in DungeonKeeper. Custom Event - Arguments is listening for a specific phrase, in this case "JokeTrigger" to be sent to it, and it will only fire the script when it receives this message. Throwing it all together, when the player hits a certain mark, a random joke is told, and with the use of Custom Events, we can have lots of those marks all around the scene all sending messages back to the main controller.

     Thanks for reading. This script-bit is pulled from Tire Fire Rally. If you want to see more, go add the game to your wishlist. Either way, come back later for more jank script tutorials.

 

 

 

Tire Fire Rally - Announcement

     This is going to be a new type of post for this page, an actual dev-blog entry instead of just tutorials. I said in the bio that I sometimes make games, and now I have to make good on that.

    I'm now working on a stupid rally-racer called Tire Fire Rally, and thanks to a grant from Mangotronics, it's coming to Steam. (These will probably get more polished and focused as time goes on, but I wanted to share this and I'm inpatient.) I've mentioned in some of my tutorial posts that you can support this blog by buying my last game, but if you're looking for a cheaper way to show support, you can go wishlist this game and start spreading it around.

    This game exists for two reasons; I got the game Corvette free with my original Xbox and I used to play a game called drunk driving in college with Mario Kart where you had to finish your drink by the end of the race, but couldn't drink and drive at the same time. After a race or two, all the karts started to get a bit sloppy on the corners.

    With Tire Fire Rally, I'm hoping to combine Corvette and Drunk Driving, having a game that at first presents itself as a serious (but retro) racing game and devolves into the ridiculousness of kart racing mechanics and drunk college kids. I want the other cars to drive like idiots, the announcer to be at least six drinks in, the sponsors to be scams, and the tracks to be designed with negligence.

    I hope that you'll all come back in the future to read more (and better articles) about a racing game with toll booths, but if not, you can still always wishlist the game (and start opening that page on all the model computers at Best Buy) and forget about it until launch. And if you're here for tutorials and mad that there's a half-assed blog on the front page, I promise I'll have more for you soon.
    Later.

Top Down Tank Tutorial: Health and Death

 

    I think this is the last piece of the code for the tank, all taking damage, gaining health, and dying. Let's get to it.

     The tank has two main colliders, one regular physical collider with a rigid body, and then one slightly larger set as a trigger zone. Things that can hurt the tank like bullets, explosions, enemy shells, all have their own assigned tags. When they cross into the tanks trigger zone, that first bit of script in front of the "If" function is checking the tag to trigger the according health loss. One thing I always forget, and it takes a very long time to debug if you're sleep deprived, the Collider from the On Trigger block needs to be hooked up to the Compare Tag block with that elusive green line.

    After the compare/if bit, you can see the Get Variable block pull the tanks current health, subtract the Enemy_Bullet_Damage, and then it feeds that up to a set variable block to update the tanks health.

     The next bit is updating the players health in the UI. This bit is also called On Start (top block) so that the UI shows the players health as full. When the player takes damage, this bit updates the Public_Player_Health and then sends a message (Custom Event) to the scene controller (Dungeon Keeper) telling it to set the UI health to be the same as the Public_Player_Health.

    This next block I call "popping" the UI, which I go over more thoroughly here. Basically changing the color and size of the UI element just for a moment so the player actually notices something has updated.

    This last bit, since Top Down Tank is but a simple game, checks if the players health is less than or equal to zero, and then sends the player to a scene that just says "You Died" if the math checks out. So, now that we have covered losing health and death, I'll show you the whole script and then we'll move to gaining health.

    Crash course, the crate in the ruins in the cover image is a health pick up. It has a trigger with a check looking for collision with the player character. When it gets that hit, it sends a message to the dungeon keeper and the player to update their health records, and here's how it goes.

    The first block is a Custom Event waiting to receive the message "Health40" from a crushed crate. Now comes the tricky part. We don't want the player to raise their health past the tanks maximum, so we first have a check to see if the players health is at least (Less or Equal) 40 points less than full. This game (unfortunately for me) let's the player select from a number of different tanks with different levels of health, all of which are stored in a list called T6_UpgradeList (Get Variable) from which we are pulling the first slot (List - Get Item - 0) because this tank is not upgrades. If they had two health upgrades, we'd be pulling from Index: 1.

    Once we have the health, we subtract the potential health boost (40) and then check if the player has taken at least 40 points of damage. If yes, we just go ahead and add (Set Variable - Add) the 40 points back to the players health.

    If the players health is less than 40 points from being full, we just go back to the upgrade/health list, pull the maximum recorded health, and set the player back to full. This sounds annoying and fiddly, but it's very easy to slip up and allow the players health to grow forever line they're the blob.

     Anyway, thanks for reading. Maybe next I'll go more in-depth about how pick ups work. If this is helping, maybe throw me something on Ko-Fi, or buy a Kaiju game. I'll probably keep making these either way.

    Stay fresh, cheese bags.

Top Down Tank Tutorial: Mouse Tracking

 

    Now for a very important piece of the top down tank, the jank way I make the turret track the players mouse. We'll start from the simple bits and get more fiddly from there.

    I think I've mentioned this method before in the NPC Turret Tutorial, but we'll go back through anyway. There is an empty object attached to the tank called the Sight. It's only job in the world is to look to where the mouse beacon (Mouse_Sight) is in the world at any given time so the turret can get the coordinates. So, On Update -> Look At: Variable - Mouse_Sight. All simple and good.

    Just like the sight, we're having this chunk of script fire every update because we want the turret pointing constantly at the players mouse. We're grabbing the rotation (Get Rotation) from the mouse sight from the panel just above (Object Variable: Sight) and then taking only the Y and W coordinates from that rotation data. The turret in this game is essentially 2D and stuck on the Y axis. No need for Z and X.

    We're taking the Y and W to create a new, more basic rotation and then forcing the tank turret (Set Rotation) to adopt that rotation. Still pretty simple.

     So, with this we are essentially treating the view as a 2D image, getting the position of the mouse on the screen, and the projecting that (Physics - Raycast) down until it hits something (Raycast Hit - Get Point). There is an invisible object in the game we mentioned earlier called the Mouse_Sight that this script is attached to and this script is constantly moving the object to where it thinks the mouse should be landing in the scene so the turret can track it. It's sort of a pain in the ass.

     Last an most important bit, you need to set the Field of View in your camera to 20 or higher. The higher that number, the broader the plane from which your mouse can project and the more accurate the mouse tracking will be. It is lower than 20 by default. So, make sure to fix that.

     That's it for now. I'll try to have what I expect to be the last part up next week. If this is helping, maybe throw me something on Ko-Fi, or buy a Kaiju game. I'll probably keep making these either way.