It’s the most wonderful time of the year! Christmas just came and went, and New Year’s Eve is approaching quickly. I hope you appreciated our December 25th post– next year I’m definitely going to 3D print the Vega Duo and use it as a Christmas tree decoration.
What’s up?
To be fair I was thinking to postpone this blog entry to next month, because holiday preparations ended up taking almost half of December and I had less overall time to work (righteously so!), but I decided to commit to this blog, so here we are. Overall this was a good month, and I even went to a game developer meeting here in Rome, where I saw many old and new faces. It was great to see them all again and we are planning more meetings soon, especially since Global Game Jam is right around the corner, and most of us join that at a local venue in Rome.
Downtown Club
Without any maintenance needed on V-Speedway this month, DTC takes the spotlight. I’m sorry to say I still don’t have much new graphics to show, mostly because I had to prioritise working on features that will be needed for the internal Alpha I mentioned in previous posts. Let’s see what’s been done:
- You can now check both all-time and monthly track records on any leaderboard. This way even if the all-time leaderboard is filled with records that feel impossible to beat, there’s still a chance to shine in the monthly competition.
- Racetrack preview is animated and shows the selected race direction. Shader magic!
- Player Profile has been updated with level, experience, extra stats in a dedicated page, and a proper suit selection page. There will be a mirror there soon!
- Car selection is better organised with small previews for the selected car and paint, and a separate stats panel.
- When not in the Profile page, a small Profile Bar will hover on top of the menu to always show your level and experience- and some more info later on.
- Added dead zone setting for controller thumbsticks.
This all, plus the usual dose of smaller changes and fixes that are not really interesting to list here, but that always make you lose that day or two. Like, trying every solution to get the road to look good at a sharp view angle due to mipmapping being too aggressive, only to discover it was all fault of a single wrong option- I will regret this for days.
Preparing the internal Alpha is taking quite some time, but that’s mostly because I want a lot of the content to give a great impression right from the first tests. On the other hand, the core gameplay loop finally works again! It didn’t break on its own of course, but the amount of new stuff in DTC was more than enough to require rewriting a lot of the original V-Speedway code that just wasn’t meant to handle all these new options.
Discord server overhaul
This was long overdue: I turned the official V-Speedway server into the official Commuter Games server, a better fit for VS, DTC, and all the games that we might develop in the future. New icon, new banner, new role icons, and a new layout for channels and categories, without losing any of the previous content. Are you in the server yet? Come say hi!
Wrapping Up
What a year. Many highs, many lows, but I’m glad I’m still doing this and that now DTC is moving forward at a steady rate. I’m preparing myself for a lot of things next year, so as usual, wish me luck for what’s to come. See you at the New Year’s Eve celebrations!
Oh, and let’s not forget: V-Speedway hit one million players this month. Mind boggling.
Danjel Ricci “SkyArcher”