smarter sampling on the floor...

when it samples the floor tex, it raycasts the texelspace grid to see how many screen-pixels it'll step along the scanline before hitting the next texel, and it can reuse the latest sample until then - fewer samples, sharper result!

it also does some smooth LOD, where it starts using a bigger and bigger "screen-pixel steps per sample" ratio as pixels get farther away

(before/after)

added a realtime shadow for the player's car

it only works on the floor (not the walls) but that's probably okay-enough for me

kinda going off the deep end here but now the car can cast its shadow onto the walls

it's kind of a ridiculously subtle effect, but it ties the mesh-geo, the raycaster-geo, and the skybox together, so uhhh maybe that's something

starting to think about a title screen but i'm not really sure wut to do yet

but hey i have an easy way to make text into 3D meshes (thank you, blender!) so that seems like a sane place to start

now we're talking!

been pretty busy for a few days, so not much progress here - but i've started getting into a track editor

initially this is just for me to make some built-in tracks, but i might polish it to make it user-facing if i can figure out a comfy way for people to share their maps

i can now save tracks as files, and then load them - the ghost-car in this clip is included in the track data. the spiral track file (including that ghost's replay) is 161 bytes

zipping the file actually makes it larger (241 bytes) so i think i did good. lol

conveniently, i already wrote a playdate serializer for C, for that previous music-maker app

here's the code for serializing/deserializing a track and its replay. serialization and deserialization use these same functions (the Serializer has a flag to tell it whether it's reading or writing) - so there's no need for annoying/error-prone "near duplicate" routines for input/output

it supports ascii format (more legible) and binary format (smaller file)

mostly boring backend stuff lately, but here's a clip of a track i made on the playdate and then loaded in the desktop simulator app - it includes four replays to compete against (bronze, silver, gold, author), and it seems like i can afford to show them all at once!

reduced the framerate to 30fps since it still beats that on the device, but in doing so i instantly radicalized myself into one of those "30fps is literally unplayable" people, so now i guess i have to optimize for 40 instead

(30 is fine with me in other games, i'm just used to 50 in this one)

whelp turns out i can't figure out how to get it back to 40 (particularly with 4 ghosts active) but 30 actually looks fine on the device - the lower framerate is only noticeable to me when testing in the desktop simulator

something something magic playdate screen. good enough!

added a way to save your replay from the daily challenge, as a way to "chess by mail" against your friends without having to author a map first

also a nice idea from @fsouchu: ghost cars become opaque when you're not touching them

fuck it, all the ghost cars can cast shadows too

adding some obstacles for extra level-design options

nicer tire-tracks: old version was 2D lines, new version is mesh-based. the main reason i did this was to get them to be occluded by walls, but they also gained some width variation to make them look a bit messier/dirtier

making some campaign-mode tracks - each one has four replays to compete against (bronze/silver/gold/author)

you'll unlock the next track if you get at least the bronze (or silver?) medal. maybe the author-ghosts are only unlocked after you get gold on every track? not sure yet

trying a different style of wall rendering

"walls are just meshes" simplifies a lot of the code and adds lots of new possibilities, but it also adds a slew of new demands, both in terms of code (LOD, sorting, etc) and aesthetics/legibility. feels promising so far, though

added object-sorting to fix the "inside out" walls (check the right side of the screen in the previous clip to see that) - i haven't mixed the cars into that sorting pool yet, but i'll do that soon

gonna need to figure out some static-object culling to skip faraway stuff quickly...there are a lot of small wall-meshes in a full track

various adjustments and new things

(this dips a bit below 30fps on the device, but it feels like there's still a good amount of room for improvement)

some more visual improvements

this bug is the good kind of bad

new car model - the change is...more subtle than i was hoping for, but it's got little hubcaps and side-mirrors now

another upgrade to the car model, closer camera angle, plus new trees (which are lower-poly, so i can draw more of them)

working on a second environment

adding some music and sound

(final music undecided, for now it cycles between 3 songs)

Behold, fish!
therefore Time for fish

working on a third environment (which will probably be second in the final game's level progression?)

second implementation of obstacles: the original style was "just add some extra walls," but that only worked when the walls were rendered wolfenstein-style, and also it just kinda sucked in general. new style is much more forgiving if you're not going for a tryhard perfect-run

lotta backend stuff lately, but i tried enabling tire-tracks for all the ghost cars and that's pretty fun (plus, it shows you whether or not a car is drifting, which can be really useful info!)

some UI improvements for the main menu

working on the browser-based companion app today, which intends to make it easier for people to share their maps and daily-track ghosts with each other

added a final obstacle-layout type to let me get to my campaign-mode target of 24 tracks: three pylons in a little row, so you have to do a "thread the needle" maneuver to get past them cleanly

been working on options-menu stuff - the latest part is a car-select screen, but i only have one car model so far, so i had to make an extremely high-effort placeholder to test the UI with a second car

making a weird bonus-renderer for little prize-scenes, for players who do well enough in the campaign mode (pre-render a gbuffer offline, do user-controlled lighting/fog/sky on the device)

i'm keeping the actual scenes a secret since they're player rewards, so here's a temp tester-scene instead

a neat thing here is that the actual triangles never make it to the device, so polycount doesn't affect performance or the game's download size. in this scene, each monkey-head is 60k+ triangles!

added a replay-viewer mode with some procgen camera angles:
- chase cam: random world-offset from the car, as if a drone is following it
- rigged cam: random local-offset from the car, as if a camera is attached to it
- tripod cam: random upcoming wall position, as if a bystander is watching the car go past

the game's heavy dithering looks good on the real device, but not so good when viewed fullscreen on a computer monitor - so i've been preparing for trailer stuff by getting the game to export greyscale footage

fun fact, the greyscale export operates by sicko-mode rules: it renders each frame of gameplay 32 times with different dither-pattern offsets, then blends them all together to get a final greyscale image (this is also where that scanline effect comes from)

since the game is optimized to run on a small handheld, when it's running on a PC it can do this in realtime - so the software renderer is hitting like 1000 fps (while also writing 30 files to disk per second)

got a third car mesh from a guy on the playdate discord (named choosh, i dunno his handle here!), also made some improvements to the greyscale exporter so it handles low-alpha stuff better (shadows, faded ghosts)