Wrong Bet Postmortem
Feel free to play the game! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/wrong-bet
Wrong Bet is my game for LD41, it's a racing game with a twist: Instead of controlling the cars you control a god which is actively trying to get a team to win. The idea came into life after scrolling through Wikipedia's game genres list. The original idea was a tower-defense racing game, but quickly changed to the game that ended up being made.
About a week before the LD I started working on a little node based "engine", similar to Godot. The concept worked pretty well, and was not very hard to work with, so I ended up using the engine in the game. I must admit that I ended up changing a lot of the engine during the LD as some parts of the engine were simply not well planned. I think I'm going to actually finish writing the engine for future games. I may change the name, SilverSource does not make sense (It's inspired by GoldSource, but it's not similar in any way ;))
Note: The images look horrible as I had to downscale them, and they lost quality. We really need to be able to resize markdown images! (In the HTML)First Day
Well, let's get to the actual theme. The first thing I wrote was the Track, it loads the data from a color-coded image (which is horribly ugly). The track is called by the karts to see if they are inside a wall, and to find what waypoint to go to. Alongside the Track I was writing the Kart, at the starts the physics were pretty crude, but with some work they became what is now in the game, not extremely realistic but fits the arcade style of the game.
That, and making the kart sprites and the menu theme, was the first day.
Second Day
The second day's priority was getting weapons planned and working. They were fairly easy to program just requiring a few hundred lines of code. Most weapons are implemented with a node and an entry in the GodAttack.h file. I also moved the kart spawning code to a more elegant system, and added some basic sounds. On the art-side-of-things, the forest track was designed and the race music was written!
Third Day
This day was the most intense (as usual). The game required a lot of polish, a Main Menu and a second track (the night track). I also moved the game code to the Race file, wrote the victory and defeat themes and screens and fixed a lot of bugs related to car handling. I also added the engine sounds which worked surprisingly well! They are simply a looping sawtooth wave.
Future?
There are some weird crashes that seem to happen randomly, I really should fix these! If people enjoy the game I may polish it more (listening to the feedback!) and release a post-jam version.
Also I should look into a Linux build, I hope I don't hit a brick-wall (gcc hates my VS code!).
I'm pretty sure I'm going to use this engine for future games, just have to get some fixes and get my mind around how to implement scenes. Also I really need a GUI toolkit, manually writing GUIs is no fun.
I uploaded the music to SoundCloud. It's always cool to come across one of your old projects :)
Thanks for reading, feel free to leave your projects in the comments, looking forward to rate some games!