mDevelopmentLog[2] = “Racing Against Keyboard Failures”

Hello Turtles,

This week has proved to be slightly less productive or forward moving than desired, but still, progress is progress. Moku, one of the artists I collaborated with on LudumDare 38, was kind enough to spend time and effort to improve the visuals of the Egg Drop sample/tutorial project. The finished art has not

arrived yet, but the preview looks 

great!

Saturday I started a stream with intent to provide a video tutorial on creating a Top Down Racing game with TurtleBrains. This was something I did not prepare enough for, and wound up a bit more distracted than desired. Also had to fix my template project since the recent TurtleBrains improvements involved some API breaking changes. Slightly annoying to deal with, but it will be for better results in the future.

The racing tutorial therefore did not have lap timing or on/off track detection as planned, and the physics tripped me up a fair bit. With a bit of tuning it did feel okay to play though the on/off track detection would have been useful for adding sliding around on grass. I will definitely do another top-down racer tutorial effort in the future but will plan it out a bit better and already have figured out exactly how I want to implement physics.

This racer project will provide me with a great test-bed to develop TurtleBrains networking, which I just want to see multiple cars driving around the same track from across the world, how neat would that be!?

My keyboard did send me for a scare though as the left-control key stopped working. This key is crucial for most shortcuts, as I rarely (never) use the right-control key. After dealing with a less-than-good support ticket system (not the people doing support, just the ticket creation) Razer tech and I found the issue to be a software problem and all is good again.

Stay tuned for next week with the multiplayer racing capabilities!