Back from holiday...

I am back from a great holiday, it's time to get back to work on the project... and some other things. But let's talk about the project only. I have a car, a track in progress and a playable private apk file with configurable touch and tilt controls.

What should I improve? Well, the physics are pretty simple now, I need to program the tyre physics into a way more realistic one. Well, by realistic I mean still arcade, but more believable. Once I made burnouts, but it was poorly programmed, I need to upgrade it. It'll be good on a mobile device. Tapping the accelerator will be a good way to keep the car stable without spinning out in a slow corner. Maybe I'll use animation curves for setting up the tyre friction for different situations. Also I am thinking to make an indicatior that shows how much the pedals are pressed over the touch area. So the player could "feel" the pedals more. Of course it would be optional, but a helpful thing.

Maybe I won't release more public webplayer demo, because the controls are not really good of keyboard. Or if I will, I have to program a better keyboard control with speed sensitive turning like rFactor has.

That's all for today, I am planning to make a great progress in the following week.

Working on the background...

I don't usually share only one picture, but when I do, it shows some improvement in graphics.

Hand-drawn background just made overall look better.

Facebook - Racing game photo album

I made some little progress on the racing game project for Android. Here is the current screenshot album on Facebook. For more, please like my Facebook page!

Post by Adam Pajor's Workshop.

Racing game? It'll be done!

I started a racing game back then, but I didn't make any progress in the last months. It doesn't mean, I forgot about it or I gave it up! I was working on that Flappy Bird clone. Also I had problems with the car physics.

A pretty old screenshot...

Good news, I found a pretty good way to make the cars work with the wheel collider component of Unity. It will be a little bit arcade style, but also it'll be fun. And it will be pretty stable at high speeds too. Nothing to worry about!

...and a newer one.

Also I'll make the tracks low poly, but detailed. It'll work on PC and Android too. What I learnt from my Flappy Bird project is handling MySQL databases through Unity. I think it'll be a useful thing for online lap time comparison.

[Game Review] - Pixel Dungeon (Android)

Pixel Dungeon - an addictive rogue-like experience

Platform: Android

Developer: Watabou

Genre: RPG, Rogue-like

Date of release: 2013 (usually updated with new contents!)

Website: http://pixeldungeon.watabou.ru/

Google Play link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.watabou.pixeldungeon

Back then there was a game called Rogue. Released in 1980, it was a dungeon crawler game with random dungeon generation, released on multiple platforms. It used a non-graphical (character based) terminal interface, so there was not even pixel art graphics back then. The player could get items, fight monsters, and go deeper in the dark and dangerous dungeons. There are tons of rogue-like games, and Pixel Dungeon is one of them.

Title screen and menu (I took the screenshots from BlueStacks App Player, yes, you can play it on PC too, it works without any issues!)

First video of the project

Hello there! Here is my first video of my game. It's a very early progress, I am currently working on the physics. As you can see, it's far from perfect. I didn't program the engine, and gears, also the traction needs more programming. I'll be back with more videos soon! Enjoy!

Haladás, fejlődés, teljesítménybeli javulás

Apró lépésekben haladok az autó versenyzős játék projekttel. Jelenleg modelleket finomítgatok. De mielőtt erről szó esne részletesen, lássuk, mi is történt pár nappal ezelőtt.

Let the coding horror begin!

Hello people of internet!

This is my post about my game development progress. Well, I am trying to make a racing game for Android. My main development tool is Unity (the free version). I am still new to mobile game development. It's a little bit different than making games for PC or other high performance consoles. Mobile devices are still not as fast as desktop computers. Both GPU and CPU are weaker, some devices has low amount of RAM and storage. So it is limited and developers have to be very clever at optimizing games.

Profiling is not very easy without Unity Pro's profiler, but I found a great solution called Adreno Profiler which doesn't work on all the mobiles, but it runs with my Nexus 7 2nd Generation. So finally, I have a profiler, I can see, what costs more or less in rendering, so I can tweak my game and test again and again. It's a great tool, and easy to use. Well, this program quickly gave me ideas, how to make graphical performance higher. However, I didn't find out, how to check CPU usage in it. I have a simple CPU usage monitor on my Android device, but I can't figure out, what are the most expensive calculations.

A great method to figure out, where is your graphics bottle-necking.

Actually, I have a serious problem. My game is greatly bottleneck at physics I think. I'm not sure, but the more the cars the less the performance. I mean seriously, I put 4-6 more cars, and FPS decreases. It's not good, especially talking about a Nexus 7 which has a decent hardware. I tried out making the car meshes more simple (I just used a simple box), same problem, so the problem is not graphical, but more like the calculations are too much for Qualcomm's Snapdragon S4 Pro CPU. Very disappointing, I need to find an other was for physics, I guess. Actually, I was very happy with the current physics.

Don't know, what to do now... Well, I need to figure out, what is the exact reason for the bad performance. I need to simplify the physics as much as possible without making it very unrealistic and bad. More experiments tomorrow. For today, I am out!

Little progress... Tree and track design

I am getting on the right track with racing game development in Unity. I have a decent (but far from great) car physics for mobile, and now track design is getting better too. Also, I figured out, how should I make tree sprites quickly in high quality.

Crossed tree sprite in the background... well I won't leave it there it's too dangerous!