Put the finishing touches on City Vs Country decoration model this afternoon, this week I added Fences, Trees a Barn and allowed multiple Truffle Hunters. It’s pretty close to what I originally hoped to achieve, which feels really good… there’s a big difference in knowing how to do something and actually doing it, it’s nice to confirm you’re not fooling yourself.

Only thing it really needs is to dirty up the textures a bit, I really want people to think at first glace “Hey that looks like Mario Kart on the XBox… Errr hang on that’s not quite right?”.

The Style will develop as I continue to create assets.

I’ve pretty much finalised all the track asset formats now so I’ve started creating some finished graphics for some of the tracks, in the shots above you can see the new sky dome/horizon model as well as an example of some track decoration models.

This track still needs some trees and fencing but it feels good to finally start realising some of my original vision.

Here’s a shot of BrownBot’s new splash screen, still needs a bit more line work to bring it in-line with the other splash screens style but I think the rough cell shading base rendered off the original model came up nicely.

Had a great session on the Wacom this arvo, adding some pigtails to Ms Hot Dirchie and masking her colours off in preparation for her introduction as a playable character. Still need a hot model for in game but the splash screen came up awesome.

This isn’t actually today’s work, but some screen grabs I sent to the work guys a few weeks ago. “Rim It” is the first original track I’ve created, you race around the rim of a monster in the desert (very similar to a certain Starwars desert dwelling monster).

Today I spent testing out how much detail I can put into the levels and still have them playable in 4 player split screen.

The answer is a fair bit, but less is best to keep the frame rate up, I have a hunch if I re-jigger the viewport rendering so each object is loaded and then each viewport is rendered rather than each viewport individually I’ll get a big speed increase… but that’s going to take a lot of work!

Started to go a bit nuts hanging around the house by myself today, got some good work done this morning but after the big work party late lunch I couldn’t face any more code, so I fired up Max and started plugging away at a model for the escape pod idea I’ve had on the back burner for a while.

This is a pretty good start, there will eventually be an actual bike, it’ll do for a rough implementation to see if the idea is any fun to play.

What was intended to be a quick session to knock up a placeholder model for the Truffle Hunter (a large flying pig that incessantly hunts down the player currently holding the Truffle) turned out an almost complete model. Still needs some texturing but the model turned out better than I planned.

If you’re wondering what the hell I’m going on about… The truffle itself starts out on the track, the hunter doesn’t swing into action till someone accidentally or intentionally runs over it. The truffle can be passed on to another player by ramming their car.

It should add another layer to the racing game play.. now back to the code so I can see it in action!

I present to you the first draft of Dark Dirchie (He was going to called Dirch Vader or Darth Dirchie but I’ve got no idea on the legalities of doing a parody so I figure I’d better air on the side of caution).

He’s going to the number on Dirchie to beat, I’m going to pump up his AI’s elastic banding to the best racing line and boost his karts weight so he’ll be a formidable opponent.

Code wise I’ve added AI Dirchies to fill out the party in single player mode (optionally in multiplayer), this streamlines the game design to only the party mode which narrows the goal posts for me completing the game, but puts more emphasis on me getting the AI “right” to make a compelling single player experience.

I also woke up with a “eureka” moment, as I realised how to solve a bug I introduced into the collision system with my garbage collection optimisation.

We’re getting there.

If anyone has any more suggestions (the sillier the better) leave me a comment?

While I’m waiting for my machines to catch up I thought I’d blog this little doodle from the other night, each character/head type has 3 main art assets, the model and texture as well as a 2D splash.

I’ve been keen to get back into some pencil artwork to get off the computer for a bit so the splashes are going to be like the following, a slightly rough pencil sketch scanned into photoshop for shading and then a splash of colour.

This is what it looks like in Photoshop, you can’t really see it but there’s a slight blue tint to the face, that is to mask the face off from being coloured.

I’ve got a custom pixel shader that tints any part of the picture that is pure gray scale with the Dirchies selected colour.

This is what it looks like in game, I think it has a certain charm to it.

If anyone has any ideas for characters I’m all ears, I’m currently working on a Dirch Vader and Afro Dirchie, I’ll need at least 8 all up.