Platform Racing clone game dev

[Adulock77]

Very cool! I'm sure you'll release this game before the actual PR4 comes out!!

Ouch! shots fired at jiggmin :v

[Northadox]

Very cool! I'm sure you'll release this game before the actual PR4 comes out!!

I got so tired of begging that I decided to make my own Racing on Platforms game!!
The flattery is nice, but I have a habit of slacking as well, so who knows if I'll ever "finish" it. As it is, you can always compile the in-development builds...

[Camer the Dragon]

I got so tired of begging that I decided to make my own Racing on Platforms game!!
The flattery is nice, but I have a habit of slacking as well, so who knows if I'll ever "finish" it. As it is, you can always compile the in-development builds...

Well you will probably get further than the title screen lol

[Northadox]

Personal litmus test for any block-based game with creative mechanics: can you make this sprite of Quote from Cave Story? No? Then something ain't right.

Saving/loading levels now works, ish, I've come up with a format that works pretty well (for instance, Newbieland 2 looks like this). I'm finally going to start working on animations now but I'll need to make some sort of animation editor and an animation format first to animate everything because I don't want to painstakingly hardcode in a bunch of animations

[Northadox]

Blocks.

If you're smart, you might know which ones correspond to PR2/PR3 ones.

[Lego-man945]

Blocks.

If you're smart, you might know which ones correspond to PR2/PR3 ones.

Why is kirby a target now?

[Northadox]

Why is kirby a target now?

That's just my bootleg design for Egg Minions.
I love me some Kirby designs so I thought I'd steal one

[Magyar]

Blocks.

If you're smart, you might know which ones correspond to PR2/PR3 ones.

Awesome!!

[Northadox]

hi I'm still working on this. I don't really have much to show you right now because this is the third time I've refactored (plus I did get a little sidetracked with my orbit remake but I swear this is the one. at the moment it's just a pair of rectangles mucking about in rather featureless levels. nearly all blocks (except rotate blocks, egg minions) have at least a part of their intended functionality though and there's some other stuff like LE features and some GUI as well. I really want to get all the foundations of racing down before I go about making a more cohesive experience. as mentioned before, everything is on my Gitea page if you want to gauge progress.

if I hadn't made it clear before, I've intended for this game to be a marriage between the best of PR2/PR3 + whatever I have the fortitude to program. will it be well-written, well-performing, well-featured, and well-polished? WELL, hopefully, but I'm just an amateur programmer slamming my head against a keyboard until pretty pictures come out.

here are some cool item design concepts for the game. pretty much everything in PR2 + base PR3 + something lost but not forgotten.

items

"thunder wand" is pretty much the replacement for Lightning; it'll function differently. let's face it, Lightning sucks. it's not fun. nobody likes Lightning in PR2. you're just racing along and BAM you get stunned with no knowledge of anything. other items you can at least be aware of their presence before you receive an attack. the concept itself works better in a party game like Mario Kart but I never enjoyed it in PR2.  I think I'll have it work kind of like a disjointed, area-of-denial attack that makes a field of electrifying energy but we'll see how I do it. plus it adds a new genre of items to PR. you know, laser gun is sci-fi, the sword looks like a cutlass pirates would use, but now we've got magic too!

[Magyar]

I can't wait to play your game! Good luck with your project my friend!

[ThePizzaEater1000]

Would be nice if there was an item that worked like Lightning that was off by default or whatever, that we could still put into levels. The PR2/PR3 lightning behavior can be pretty useful for certain sorts of maps.

Also, would be fun to see a Lua implementation of some sort, it can open up a lot of avenues for cool levels (and crash blocks, but the tradeoff is worth it imo).

[Northadox]

Would be nice if there was an item that worked like Lightning that was off by default or whatever, that we could still put into levels. The PR2/PR3 lightning behavior can be pretty useful for certain sorts of maps.

Also, would be fun to see a Lua implementation of some sort, it can open up a lot of avenues for cool levels (and crash blocks, but the tradeoff is worth it imo).

Maybe I'll just have the item behave like Lightning in a "legacy mode" I'll make (which will eschew my clone game's new mechanics/additions in order to be consistent with PR2's, e.g., cursor camera control plus some other things I'm planning).

About custom blocks, that's something I'm very split on. While it sounds like an absolutely spectaular addition for a PR game, personally I felt like it made levels using them very hard to "read" at first play, as there's no way to know what blocks a level is going to have, and what the extent of their functions are.  When you enable custom blocks, you're placing an additional burden on the level's author to not only make their level play well, but also visually and functionally read well, and tee bee eff, not many of them did that.

What I DO want to do is to have the ability to customize blocks in place, e.g., the old idea of Jiggmin's block skins from one of his Motley Mondays. Not only will all blocks be able to be colored, but I could also make it so that the texture for all the blocks would be able to be replaced by the level's author. It might be disorientating at first, but a player will know that all the blocks in the level will be limited to the functionality that the game provides, not the one the author makes themselves. It'd be a nice compromise me thinks.

If I did ever change my mind though it's still a long way off. Adding a Lua interpreter sounds hard too :v

[ThePizzaEater1000]

I feel like block skins are pretty limiting, since then you don't get the side level control that a lot of levels could really use (traps levels). You could maybe add both, and then have an indicator for when a level uses custom blocks with player-made functionality so that players have a heads up or whatever. That way, you allow a lot of innovative new ways to make a basic deathmatch with a gimmick that barely affects gameplay.

Lua (or just some sort of block scripting really) should absolutely be added if you do add some form of custom blocks, for reasons mentioned in the previous post and also it's better for level makers when they don't have to spend 8 hours making a weird mechanism to do something that can be done with 20 lines of code instead.

(Also, ideally you'd use LuaJIT rather than the interpreter, for the extra performance that 0.2% of projects will actually take advantage of. If you do go that route tho, remove player usage of FFI, since letting people run arbitrary C code on other people's computers isn't really a great idea I think.)

[Hahli144]

Wow! Great stuff!
I've recently been dreaming about doing something similar, if only i had enough time to devote to such a huge project.

Checking the code out now, having some trouble compiling on mac m1... i'll try to figure it out

[Hahli144]

I guess i got it to work? Is the character supposed to look like this?
(latest commit had some compiling issues, i was able to get the previous commit bc1408c654 to compile)

[Northadox]

I guess i got it to work? Is the character supposed to look like this?
(latest commit had some compiling issues, i was able to get the previous commit bc1408c654 to compile)

-pic-

WOW somebody actually compiled it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I didn't know about the compiling issues but like I said it's all in active development so I can't guarantee stability

YES that is very much intentional and a placeholder; it's the character's collision box/hurtbox respectively.

[Hahli144]

How far are you actually thinking of taking this? Is the goal to eventually have something that the community can play online?

Have you thought about making this playable on the browser? I've heard about this thing called WebAssembly (never used it), it supports SDL2
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/WebAssembly

I would definitely be interested in working on this project if you're looking for collaborators, however i really don't know how much time i can devote

[Northadox]

How far are you actually thinking of taking this? Is the goal to eventually have something that the community can play online?

Have you thought about making this playable on the browser? I've heard about this thing called WebAssembly (never used it), it supports SDL2
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/WebAssembly

I would definitely be interested in working on this project if you're looking for collaborators, however i really don't know how much time i can devote

as for how far I'm taking this, as far as I can really. I will battle scope creep as much as I can!

yes! I've looked into Emscripten for another project, and I will definitely consider a version compiled for the web, but I'll cross that bridge once I get there.

if you're genuinely interested in working on this project, the Github page is open for commits, and you can always PM me if you want to set something up.

[Different]

Make a Mac version too @Northadox

[Different]

No one should ever target Mac, imho, and I wish developers would stop bending over backwards for Apple and their users so the company can just suffocate itself with its continuous stream of unethical decisions and anti-consumer practices. And yet that will never happen, because there will always be people like a certain admin of a certain website (who is "very happy to be a Mac user"), who will readily make up for Apple's relatively small market share by paying ridiculous prices for underspecced junk.

Of particular relevance, Apple has deprecated OpenGL (the "old" standard graphics API, which has been ubiquitous since the 90s) and afaik does not support Vulkan (the "modern" standard graphics API and official successor of OpenGL), in favour of their own graphics API "Metal" (which is only supported on Apple platforms). In other words, Apple doesn't want games to be run on any other platform but their own; they're basically saying, "if you want your game to run on our platform, you need to develop specifically for our platform". What they're doing is disgusting and really shouldn't be encouraged.

I'm guessing you're a Windows user; it was pretty obvious from your statements. Before I go any further, let's just say that Apple has better security than Windows. You're more than likely to obtain a virus with Windows than you are Mac. I'm not saying that Mac is untouchable, but they do value security more than Windows.

Now, Imho, game developers need to start making games that's readily available for all pc platforms, instead of just catering to one specific pc platform. That's why I mentioned making one for Mac. What's disgusting is how certain pc gaming platforms like Indie Horror games, only cater to Windows users. So, Mac isn't the only company who has developers bending over backwards for them.