Ok so we're into day 2, I wanted to quickly post about progress from the first 24 hours.

Going offroad for LD50!

I certainly like the theme for this jam, and had plenty of ideas right off the bat. But one game/prototype thats been bouncing around in my head for a few weeks now is a game about driving a jeep/vehicle over randomly generated terrain. Mixing this idea in with 'delay the inevitable' and I brainstormed the idea that youre transporting explosives or something dangerous - with some kind of chaos (hazards) going on and youre just desperatly trying to delay the inevitable failure. This idea set the game up nicely and I really like how it fits in with the theme. Ive got some further ideas about how to 'delay' the inevitable here too, so theres room to add even more.

But on to the basics, I need a vehicle controller thats fun for starters! Ive never made a physics enabled car before, so this was interesting to tackle.

First hour, after some brainstorming, a 3D modeled a jeep!

Heres some placeholder (static) terrain to test on - the green circle is a debug 'goal' area, which the player will be chasing around a map to get to.

2 hours in and I had a very simple jeep and terrain setup, basically a mockup of the main elements of the game here.

Vehicle physics have been interesting to get into as well, but I pretty quickly got a decent suspension setup going, along with a system which can be set to front-wheel-drive, rear-wheel-drive, or all-wheel-drive. Acceleration is also based on both whether a wheel is in contact with the ground, if its enabled via the drive select and if the wheel exists. This makes for a pretty interesting system where wheels can be disabled, fall off, or just dynamically not provide acceleration if theyre not touching the ground - and all of these elements will effect the way the vehicle handles.

(ie front wheels will only provide acceleration if its a front or all-wheel-drive vehicle and the wheels are currently touching the ground)

Now I need to get into some more game-type stuff before I tackle terrain later today. So I'm in for a long night! Im still deluding myself saying I can make the COMPO here with this, but I have a good feeling I'll be entering into the JAM to get that final 24h of time.

Sharing lots of updates and gifs on my twitter:

twitter.com/Alex_ADEdge