Plan for Craig Ball

I had to laugh to myself. Just before I posted my .plan, I read the other .plans and J Lesko did a car game for GID9, but had posted late because he didnt start until Sunday.

Well, for GID9, I did a car game, but I'm posting late because I didnt start until Sunday! I had a christening and a kids birthday on Saturday, so no game dev for then.

Anyway, here's my GID9 info. It's my first one on my own (Melv and I did Kinetik last time around), however I was quite pleased with the results.

The idea came around from a conversation in the car with Melv. We have an hours drive to work each morning and night, and the traffic is frustratingly slow, or dangerously fast. I came up with the idea of a car sim that mimicked (is that the right spelling?) driving on the road called "No need for speed".

Pretty simple really. You have a road. You have a number of AI cars. The AI cars will overtake / pull in / speed up / slow down. Your job is to avoid crashing in to them and get to your destination safely. Lets say you have one day to get there and you are going to, say, Rome. Which would make the full title:

"No Need For Speed: Rome In a Day"

(cool, I think I got away with that tenuous GID9 theme link).


Hour 1:

I spent a bit of time writing down simple ideas, and working out how the AI would need to interact with it's environment. It came down to a few rules, which werent too difficult. Always the best way.

Hour 2:

Anyway, it all started with the artwork. Now Im not an artist, so stop laughing at my attempts. No really stop laughing. For the cars, I found a top down image of a car, chopped it in half and mirrored it. I used the other half and mirrored that, to create the fat and thin car styles. I then greyscaled it, and colourised it with primary and secondary colours. Simple, huh?

For the road, I used the texture filter in photoshop, selecting a sandstone filter. Add to this a nice while rectangle, and hey presto. Instant highway.

Programmer art at it's best.

Hour 3:

Here I set up a blank project, and started throwing some graphics on screen. I put a highway on screen, and I was able to add cars on screen with the left mouse button. aka - very quick prototype. In case you didnt work it out from the title on the window, I used Torque 2D.


Hour 4:

This was the players hour. I used the black thin car and got it to move left and right, and speed up / slow down. I also dropped in an T2D Scroller object, which was surprising easy to do (payment later Melv). I got the speed of this to match the cars change in speed, and hey presto. Moving car, moving road.


Hour 5:

I added the sound of the car revving, and put in pitch changes for each gear. I took a while to do this, as I've never really player with the alx stuff before. Once I found what I wanted, it was quite easy. The hard bit was finding something you wanted, but you didnt know what it was. I also changed a few other things like car control, number of lanes etc.

Hour 6:

Added a speedo - whoohoo. The sound had some problems aka occasional crazy pitches, so I sorted out the bugs with that one. My dodgy maths and fatigue was the cause! Also, changed the black car to have some funky red stripes and a number. Hey, Dukes of Hazzard could do this, why cant I? I didnt bother with the dixie airhorn though.

Hour 7:

Created AI car object. Created a schedule for inserting new AI cars onto the road (at top and bottom - cars faster than player appear at bottom, cars slower than player appear at top). Seemed to work quite well. This was the first time the game started to come to life, and it felt as though you were on a road! You will see that the cars magically run over each other though.


Hour 8:

Added AI rule in to slow down when a car appeared in front. At least cars didnt just crash into each other now! Oh, and chatted on IRC for a bit, and added the nice roman statue. Erm, to fit in with the rome in a day theme.


Hour 9:

Added AI overtaking and pulling back in rule. The cars now overtook each other, and pulled back in to empty spaces. You could also slow down, and cars overtook you, but waited if there was something coming (slow down rule kicks in if cars cannot overtake).

Hour 10:

Tweaking for fun! Added in a rule that makes cars speed up if they change up a lane, and slow down if they change down a lane. So slower cars go on the left, faster on the right.


What was cool was when I was driving the car, my 3 year old son came in and wanted to know what the revving noise was. He then jumped on and started driving around, which he thought was great. He loves computer games anyway, but to have him play something you have created is a real motivator.

Oh, in old Blightly we drive on the left. So, slow cars appear on the left (no international version planned as yet).

One last thing. You can tell when you have been programming too long when you keep typing a semicolon instead of a full stop at the end of your sentences;


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