Tachyon-R: A brutally fast futuristic racing game. Tearing around the narrow tracks at breakneck speeds can be deadly enough, but factor in the opponents and it becomes insane - 'more [opponents] you have, the worse it is ..'

I'm extremely happy with how this compo worked out and with what I achieved. I've long ago giving up the idea of finishing a complete and fun game within the 48 hour limit, as this just seems way too difficult - so instead this time I've concentrated on a genre of game I've never attempted before: a racing game.

I used a library which I have been building up over the last 7-8 Ludum Dares and this time around I had to write (copy/paste from stack overflow) some new methods for particular collision/response code but I still managed to get a full track generator, track/car physics and a crude A.I. racing around. The challenge is definitely shallow: simply finish the track without exploding.

As usual, I left too little time to do any decent graphics and I totally neglected soundFX/music (the only music is from Incomputech: of course I disabled the sound rating).

There is definitely a lot of room to expand on this game in coming weeks: pickups, weapons being the obvious missing components to make this a proper 2d wipeout clone - and better track generation with loops, intersections and jump would be cool. The vehicle physics are quite fun, although there is no real opportunity to use the hand-brake which is a shame.

Instructions:

WASD - movement SPACE - Air-brake M - Toggle music on/off

• Linux Build I just uploaded a linux build (with LWJGL .so natives). Unfortunately when I tested it on VMWare/Ubuntu/OpenJDK the timing function seems to be broken. I've uploaded it because maybe it is just related to my setup. This is something I'd like to fix though so feedback on how the linux build performed would be appreciated, thanks!