Tag: Tunnel Racer

There’s no new build tonight, just NEWS. I finally got around to renewing my Apple developer license, and I upgraded my Unity iOS license for Unity 4. I wanted to put Tunnel Racer on my iPhone and iPad before PAX (to play with while I was there), and it turns out it worked perfectly. I was surprised.

The best part is that no changes are needed from the version I run on my PC. The controls and UI just work, so there’s nothing special I need to do to make it run on iOS. This is great because it means I don’t have to worry about making changes every time I deploy to iOS. Even the text boxes I added for the testing panel work fine. They’re number-only entries, and on the iPhone, the numpad keyboard pops up. It’s pretty incredible how smoothly everything works.

Oh, and to top it all off, Tunnel Racer runs at 60FPS on my iPhone 4S and 3rd-gen iPad, so it’s as smooth there as it is on my PC (when running in the web player and capped at 60FPS). Framerate is something I struggled with constantly on BattleGrid, so not having to worry about it with Tunnel Racer is refreshing.

And now it’s off to PAX on Thursday to figure out what needs changing. I might even ask some strangers to play it. (Probably not.)

SimCity has been dominating my free time lately. I’ve spent a few hours just waiting for servers over the past few days… So that’s why there hasn’t been an update in a few days.

But on to this update. I haven’t changed much. All I’ve added is a new “testing” section to the main menu, that lets you turn on invincibility and override the ship speed settings. This is gearing up for an iOS build that I want to take with me to PAX, so I can play with settings while I’m there and maybe come up with some adjustments for when I get back. I also want to see how everything feels on a touchscreen device.

Tunnel Racer v20a

Tonight’s build introduces a new “Doom” mutator, which slowly eats away at your health over time. Health pickups are spawned more often, and bombs are spawned less often. It still needs some balancing (I think it’s a bit too easy).

With this mutator, I also decided to group the mutators so the mutually-exclusive ones can’t be activated together. For instance, you can’t enable both “Accelerator” and “Turbo” anymore, or “Sudden Death” and “Doom”. They’re effectively divided by what they modify – currently just speed and health.

I’ve also added a new UI effect when you’re damaged, and I may have found the source of the level switching bug. I can’t be certain, but I found a place where I was missing a “Level Complete” reset, so it might be fixed. No promises this time.

That’s all for tonight. I’m off to fight with the SimCity servers until I can actually play.

Tunnel Racer v19a

I think I’ve got the bugs from last night sorted out, but other than that, not much has changed tonight besides a new effect on the level transition text.

Tunnel Racer v18a

EDIT
I lied. Apparently the level bug is still there, but I still can’t make it happen reliably; so I can’t figure out what’s wrong or how to fix it. Hopefully I’ll accidentally fix it somewhere along the way.

Minor fixes to the levels mechanic in this version – the countdown timer only starts once you’ve reached max speed, and you only have to survive for 5 seconds (it’s OK if you hit the X panels now). I’ve also fixed a few problems with the end-level boost not always kicking in. (I think I’ve seen it still fail, but it seems exceedingly rare now.)

That’s it for this version – I didn’t get a lot of time to work on it today.

Tunnel Racer v16a

This version sees the introduction of one new ship model (the 2HP, 8 Speed ship) and the beginning of work on levels. The way levels currently work is that you have to reach max speed, then survive for 5 seconds without hitting any X panels. After you’ve survived 5 seconds, ramps will start to appear.

Hitting a ramp will launch your ship into the center of the tunnel, where it will boost past any remaining panels in the level, then land at the end. At the moment you just sit and hover for a bit until the next level starts, but there will eventually be a transition between the levels.

Right now, switching levels does nothing but give you a break for a few seconds. When complete, each level will add to a point multiplier and increase the difficulty.

There are some bugs with this new stuff. Most importantly, when launching off a ramp you won’t always zip past the remaining panels. I’m not sure exactly why (haven’t stared at it long enough), but it’s somewhat minor for now. There are also some issues with the new UI elements (sticking around longer than they should), but again, it’s fairly minor.

The 5-second no-X requirement may be a bit strict, so I might have to make it “survive 5 seconds”. It was originally 10 seconds, but while trying to capture those shots above, I died so many times I decided to cut it in half.

If you want to check out the new stuff, try playing with the “Turbo” mutator on – since you start at full speed the 5-second countdown begins immediately.

Tunnel Racer v15a

EDIT
Yeah, I think the no-X requirement is a bit tough… That will probably be coming out later. There’s also seems to be significantly more bombs in this version. That will change, too… Once I add in the difficulty changes between levels.

And it looks like the countdown timer starts with the level, even without turbo mode.

I think I’m finally getting closer to having the lane shift speeds acceptable. Overall, the changes are slower than they were, and the changes between speeds are much lower, but it feels about right for both the slowest and fastest ships, so I’m happy.

More good news – I figured out why the lane shifting was suddenly stopping when you hit an X panel. Turns out it’s because of a poorly documented action in PlayMaker, which was accidentally catching my rotation action and killing it. Now that I know what I’m doing, that’s been fixed and it’s back to working properly.

So, in this version, the speeds are better, the lane shifting is fixed, and I’ve made some changes that should result in better control. I also tweaked the bounding boxes on a few of the ships to make it easier to shift between panels.

Tunnel Racer v14a

Tonight’s another minor update. I’m still working on the lane shift speeds. They’re slower in this version, ranging from 0.625 seconds (slowest ship at the lowest speed) to 0.1 seconds (fastest ship at the highest speed). They still don’t feel quite right.

I’ve also found a new bug and I have no idea what’s causing it. If you hit an “X” panel while shifting, your shift will get cut short (you’ll stop between lanes). There’s a temporary fix in that will force your rotation to what it should be after every lane shift, but it’s a jarring effect and as soon as I figure out what’s going on, it’s coming out.

The good news is I’m learning more about PlayMaker’s capabilities and cleaning up my FSMs, so it should be easier to manage everything… As soon as I figure out what’s causing that damn lane shift bug…

Tunnel Racer v13a

EDIT
There’s also some bugs with the UI shaking. I think a lot of my problems revolve around FSMs responding to certain events every time they occur, and I’m not resetting states properly… Work for tomorrow, I suppose.

EDIT AGAIN
OK, so I figured out the UI shaking problem, and it was exactly what I thought it was. Still don’t know why the lane shifts aren’t working properly…

Tonight’s build is mostly fixes and work towards fixing the controls. I learned how I should be handling animations with PlayMaker, so they’ve been updated to work that way. Overall, it makes handling the animations significantly cleaner. Now, the pieces that control the animation and the input (along with ship rotation in the tunnel) are separate, meaning I can tweak them separately without having a negative impact on any of the others… In theory.

Along with those changes, I totally changed the speed system, but right now it’s in this weird intermediate state where it feels a lot worse than before. I think I’m working with a more solid foundation but it’s going to take time to figure out what’s right again.

With that in mind, I’ve got a teeny debug window running in the corner that shows animation speed and animation time. The normal turning animation is 0.5 seconds long. Each ship’s turn rating determines a speed multiplier. A turn rating of 1 is equal to a 1x speed multiplier. For each point above 1, there’s an increase of 0.02 to that multiplier, with an extra boost to 1.2x at rank 10. This multiplier is combined with your current speed to determine the animation speed. So, with a speed multiplier of 1x, and a speed of 5, the animation runs at 5x speed, or 0.1 seconds (assuming my math is correct). This results in really quick turns for even the slowest of ships. the highest multiplier of 1.2x at speed 5 results in 6x speed, or about 0.083 seconds.

I think what I’m getting at is that a flat multiplier like this probably isn’t going to work. The minimum animation speed should maybe be around 0.8x (0.625 seconds), and the maximum around 2x (0.25 seconds) or maybe 5x (0.1 seconds). I’ll have to whip out Excel and make some graphs. (Whee! Numbers!)

Anyway, despite the problems with this build, I’ve decided to put it up here anyway, if only so I can look back and see how things changed over time.

Tunnel Racer v12a