Black Sunshine

[quote:28njrbs9]Gripping the wheel his knuckles went white with desire

The wheels of his Mustang exploding on the highway like a slug from a .45

True Death: 400 Horsepower of maximum performance piercing the night

This is Black Sunshine.

Hey people. Here's a prototype for a physics side-view racing game. Mad max inspired of sorts. It's my first attempt with physics. Still rather boring, i need to add me some more scenery and props, and music and powerups and fancy effects, and also them cars are probably gonna be redesigned at some point (plus there should be 8 different models), to make them a bit brighter and, ehm, breakable.

As always, your opinions and suggestions are appreciated

Click or touch to move, press space or hit the speedometer to nitro.

PLAY!

Amazing Graphics dude.

This is cool, I understood that it was a race when I was lucky enough to finish one game.

It reminds me a checkpoint game where you move a car across zombies, Earn to die

Maybe an inspiration, I like your mad max graphics.

Some suggestions:

-Remove the collision with other cars (impossible to pass the cars during the race) -Increase the view in front of the car -Guns on the car to shoot the opponent in front of us is needed -More things to destroy: wood installations, crates, signs, walls, cactus -Add a warning sign before the cliff jumps

Keep up the good work.

erickson400

Pandadoor

Thanks guys! I'm still defining the graphic style, but you see i'm going for thick cartoonish lines, brownish colours... Still a lot's gonna change, like that speedometer, which looks like a clock, or the finishline, which as for now is a copy of the startpoint with some checks on it. I intend to plagiarize VASTLY from that earn to die series XD

You should be able to pass (over) other cars using nitro (press space bar, or touch the speedometer shortly), which makes and impulse forward and a bit upwards too, kind of jumping. They work better if you hit them when running fast. At the current state of it you should be able to get 1st somewhat easily if you run the beetle (and if you dont meet too many pickups), which is the lightest and fastest of the three models. The pickup is not too bad either, i usually get 2nd or 3rd with it. The nazi mustang (the "rustang" it's calld) sucks big time tho. All them to be tweaked in the future. I explain, or try to, the race mechanics below...

There are already warning signs! They're tiny and blurry and just perching over the very edge of each cliff

Mechanics (as everything else) are very provisional as for now. I indeed may set it to scale outer, so you have a bit more of visual field, but i'd like it to be, hum, short-ranged of sorts. Sure will be fuelcans to collect, barriers to break and exploding kegs, and most likely some firearms too. Collisions between cars stays tho! Furthermore i'm planning to make them break into pieces when hit! I might enhance the nitro to make it easier to pass (or be passed by) other cars, or introduce some other powerup.

The race thing is very wip still. It works as follows. (I'd particularly appreciate feedback on this, cos it's a bit weird).

• You start alone. Don't really like this, i may do some mock animation in which all cars seems to start a second before you or something and leave you behind from the beginning (happens to me in all racing games). Has to be mock, as you'll see.
• Scattered along the way you meet some invisible (orange) spawnboxes. When you (the pc car) hit one from the left, an enemy car is spawned offscreen in the oposite side of the spawnbox, which is destroyed. So shortly after that, you meet the enemy car on the road.

• If an enemy car hits one of these spawnboxes before yo tho, the later is destroyed and no other car is spawned, but you get one penalty point, which means that you've already lost 1 position. This means that if you stay just behind another car without somehow passing it for a long distance, chances are that it (enemy car) is hitting all the spawnboxes and making you loose positions. So you need to pass them fast!
• If any enemy car crosses the finish line earlier than you, obviously you get another penalty point...
• And at the end, the textbox (dat spritefont belongs of course to another project, still need to make one for this one) shows your final position which is equal to all your penalties + 1 (as it's 0 based). No penalties = 0 + 1, youre first. Six penalties = 6 + 1, yer 7th.

-Hope it makes sense...

Notice thus that there's no eight cars running towards the goalpoint from the beginning -- and as many fall down the cliffs, it would be very rare to have eight cars on the layout at any given time (but maybe i should destroy them anyway when theyre left behind far enough, yknow for performance). It might seem unfair the fact that maybe you've already lost several positions when you're not even half race done, but the player shouldnt be aware of how it works, so the whole thing should feel consistent. (And anyway, he shoulve been FASTAH!).

One interesting thing of this method (?) is that it will hopefully allow me to make something halfway between a "classic" race circuit and a more arcade oriented level. I could have several cars to be spawned at a certain order (weaker, of slower, first), and a big bad boss at the end -- which you may meet only if you pass all the previous cars on time or something. But hey now i'm rushing too ahead! I'd like this project to be simple.

Oh shit look at that post. Sorry guys. Ah, one last thing! The game is much easier on PC than on mobile/tablet -- because of that thing about physics being always framerate-dependent for some reason, i reckon. What's the approach, here? Is there any turnaround? Or sould I just go mobile-first?

Thanks for your patience!

Cool stuff- Loving the old White Zombie reference there too! Seems ol Rob's work can always find a comfortable spot in an explosive car title! (Twisted Metal)

I've played on pc and had no problem, the nitro/jump to pass a car is a good idea you could improve or it's just me who is really bad at this. (Finished 4/8, I was stuck with a pickup on a pickup.)

The car positions and how you do it is good, it's not a race simulator and you don't need to have the 8 cars visible at the start. You could add a text with your position during the race and use the penalties system for this.

The warning signs are tiny and I played quickly the first time, maybe someone else paying more attention will notice them.

It's a quick game where you want to feel the 400 Horsepower while exploding things on your way, this is how I see it. You could add a blur effect on the background based on your speed, points when you destroy things and the outscale effect based on your speed like in earn to die.

Pandadoor

DarkRoomGames

Thank you guys for your interest and comments!

I thought I was gonna call it Rust Racers – but seemingly there's a mod or a vpp or some damn thing already with that name. I picked then Black Sunshine on the go, just to call it something here in the this thread. It's a cool title, although not 100% definitive yet ("Jesus Built My Hotrod" being another tempting possibility). Anyway I like the reference very much, so I made a car directly inspired in it – another Mustang, obviously. I'm gonna make it an unblockable car and... but well, here I am again leaping into the far future...

Black top rolling below the asphalt drive / A concrete fascination scraping the edge of nothing...

Here! This is one of the veriest firstiest things I ever did in C2, some one thousand years ago or so. Makes no sense at all i'm afraid, but it's arguably the first sketch for this project so I put it here just as a curiosity... No such a thing as proper “gameplay”, but pressing the arrows and spacebar seems to trigger some sluggish reaction.

This is cool, I understood that it was a race when I was lucky enough to finish one game.

It reminds me a checkpoint game where you move a car across zombies, Earn to die

Maybe an inspiration, I like your mad max graphics.

Some suggestions:

-Remove the collision with other cars (impossible to pass the cars during the race) -Increase the view in front of the car -Guns on the car to shoot the opponent in front of us is needed -More things to destroy: wood installations, crates, signs, walls, cactus -Add a warning sign before the cliff jumps

Keep up the good work.

Good advice !

Welcome engineheads and octane addicts to this weekly update of the [WORKING TITLE: BLACK SUNSHINE] Dying World Series!

So here's basically the same old level with a few (very few) eyecandy improvements such as a parallax layer and a new speedometer -- the later doesn't makes a lot of sense since i'm gonna change the whole hud someday to make it fullscreen-scale-outer, but at least doesn't look like a clock anymore (and if you look at those Earn To Die snapshots above you'll see the influence).

But anyway the big, the brave, the main enhancement this week is the brand new Servo-Vehicle Dynamic Obliteration Protocol, by which cars are gradually reduced to scrap as the hit barrels and foes alike. Again, it still needs a lot of tweaking: I intend to (well, eventually) assign different toughness values to each car model and so. But the pain was mainly that I had to redesign the cars from scratch again. Sorry to say the new pickup didn't make it on time for this update, so we have only two different cars. Btw the old nazi ford mustang was replaced by a (nazi) plymouth barracuda which looks basically the same – I wanted to save the mustang model for that Black Sunshine car I babbled about above.

I introduced some health powerups as well, which fix damaged areas of your car. I'm not very happy with how they look tho: they typically appear for a blink second in a high speed context, so maybe something brighter and more clear, like a stylized logo, may fit better.

The car degradations are well executed, a lot of different parts.

I agree for the powerup, perhaps an information for the player when he grabs one like a green flash or something else.

At one point I had the impression I was flying with my car, maybe a bug with the gravity force (mouse click top right corner) or just an impression.

This is a fun one! How long have you been working on this? Got big plans?

Pandadoor

—

Thank you for your comments and feedback, brothers. Small update to fix a couple of things:

• As Pandadoor noted, the Plymouth tended to take off and fly at certain point, this was due to a bad collision shape and should be fixed now.
• I took aut the powerups. They were definitively confusing, plus they ruined to an extent that glorious feeling of your car actually falling apart on the go, not knowing if it's gonna make it to the finish line. Most likely there will be some powerup in the future, but i have to think about how to present them in-game.

I've been working in this game some three weeks, but the idea and even the preliminary design of some cars was made in some remote past (as hinted above). It's a project I've always been thinking around, kindof lazily. Look, for instance, these were done I think a couple of years ago:

I really like those designs! Rough and dangerous, like the race. You should definitely have them in the game.