Turns out I didn't get the leaderboards right on the first try. Dang. The champ boards were storing the points, cars, and wheels from the last track instead of the sum of those from the championship. It was a minor error in the secondary data, but it was worth a patch update sooner than later, especially since the other WIP could take some time to complete.

Fixes:

• Champ boards now store points, cars, and wheel sums from entire championship instead of just the last track.

Changes:

• The share image now shows the laps total from the championship (because it may not be the max laps possible), and also now changes the text for an endurance race.

[ 2022-07-30 01:12:20 CET ] [ Original post ]

Because some weren't "getting" the perhaps-too-humanlike oddball A.I.s built into the game, and/or just thinking the A.I. was not well done because some of them crash around a lot (due to their intentional and varied personalities), I had the idea to use a couple of these personalities to create a couple more "wods" (Wacky Wodifiers/Leader Lamifiers) for the game. Because the needed personalities were already built, it just took maybe only an hour or two to add and test these wods. There was already a speed racer personality for the "Bring it on" racing wod. And there was already a heat seeker personality for the "King of the hill" leader-lynching wod. With a tweak of some of their settings to make them more interesting for their particular wods, and they were good to go. I can always tune them a bit more later if needed. I must admit, it is sometimes more enjoyable, when playing alone, to race against four racing A.I.s instead of just the one in the default group of A.I.s. Although... they are pretty easy to beat on the tri-oval if you get an early lead and don't crash. They do, however, get more interesting and challenging on more interesting tracks.

New features:

• Added the "Bring it on (Racing A.I.)" wacky wodifer. Turns all A.I.s into racecar drivers.
• Added the "King of the hill" leader lamifier. Turns all A.I.s into leader lynchers (and, otherwise, overly aggressive drivers).
  • If both "Bring it on" and "King of the hill" are turned on, they spit the A.I.s between them.
• Added text to the leaderboard pages that shows which leaderboard you are looking at.

Changes:

• Minor menu changes and other code changes.

[ 2022-07-22 20:47:27 CET ] [ Original post ]

One of the few remaining major basic features has finally been added to the game. Leaderboards! (Yeah.. only local leaderboards... sorry if you were hoping for online global as well. Those will arrive only once enough sales come in to justify the expense.) As you will see once you get into them, adding leaderboards to such a broad game primarily targeted at a variety of party play, was no small task. I could have made a more simple (and rather lame) first attempt... but I'm a data engineer by day and couldn't help myself by doing it right no matter the complexity of it all (just like how I, perhaps over-zealously, tackled the physics, skidmarks, audio, and wacky A.I.). With leaderboards also comes bonafide co-op play (we hear small cheers in the distance). That is to say, part of the array of leaderboards is a 2-player time-trial leaderboard. It follows basic team-time-trial rules of recording the laps/time of the second player to cross the line, instead of the first player. So, in other words, work together to get both of you across the finish. This is automatically tracked in 2-player games, whether you like it or not; ignore it or not. If you like this feature and want to see it expanded to 3 and 4 players, let us know. Also, besides Championship and Endurance leaderboards, there are also overall leaderboards for race times and fastest-lap times (regardless of game mode they were set in). Furthermore, the game also tracks what I'm calling "Maximum Mayhem" or not. That is, if you always add a "wod" and never remove one, it knows that and rewards you with a separate leaderboard for it. And, finally, it also keeps separate boards for novice steering (for when I add that feature). Basically, too-many-thousands of records to manage in the database. We'll see if I handled it all correctly on the first try (I did test, but it's a lot to test). With leaderboards finally done, I can now hopefully get back to filling out the content (tracks and wods) and upping the art, etc. Oh, yeah, the "Wods" (Wacky Wodifiers) on the leaderboards are still cryptic. Sorry. Not sure when I'll get around to displaying the wods better. So, until then, here's my code that shows what those numbers translate to: MAYHEM_HIGHER_MAX_SPEED = 1; MAYHEM_DUCK_CROSSING = 3; MAYHEM_BUDDY_HOLLY_CROSSING = 4; MAYHEM_DISPOSABLE_CARS = 5; MAYHEM_JOUSTING = 6; MAYHEM_GREASED_CAR_SEATS = 7; MAYHEM_BIG_WHEELS = 20; MAYHEM_WIDE_WHEELS = 21; MAYHEM_DUALIES = 22; MAYHEM_SUPER_SHIELDS = 30; MAYHEM_OPPOSITE_SHIELDS = 31; MAYHEM_CARAVANS = 40; MAYHEM_BOATS = 41; MAYHEM_DRAG_CHUTES = 42; MAYHEM_PACE_CAR = 50; MAYHEM_PACE_RV = 51; MAYHEM_FINISH_LINE_DONUTS = 90; MAYHEM_LEADER_TRIKES = 91; MAYHEM_LEADER_GREASIER = 92; Also note that I cannot guarantee that scores set during "early access" will still be displayed once a final release is made. With tracks still being made and tweaked, it wouldn't be fair to contest scores from one version of a track (or tracks) against another. Some scores might even disappear during early-access development (such as when I make two more tracks and add them to the 8-track champ lineup [which currently runs 8 tracks from 6 in this order: 1,2,3,4,5,6,1,2]). Outdated scores won't be deleted from the database -- it's that I will likely not bother to find a way to display such multiple versions of scores even though I do indeed store them separately. It would be too confusing for the players most likely, and a lot of work for little payoff. Similarly, note that the demo version of the game uses the same database as the full version, and that demo scores from the "Overall Leaderboards" will indeed cross over. Because, however, the demo's 4-track championship repeats the first two tracks twice, scores from this will not be displayed in the full version's 4-track championship boards (which uses 4 different tracks). If you really want to see those demo scores after moving to the full version, run the demo and they'll still be there in the db.

Version 0.4.0

Added:

• Local leaderboards including breakouts for: overall, solo, 2-player team time trial, championship, endurance, max mayhem, race laps, fastest lap, and novice steering.

Changed:

• Updated Unity from 2017.4.30f1 to 2017.4.40f1.
• Updated Rewired from v1.1.39.1 to v1.1.41.5 (which reports as v1.1.39.3 for some reason [likely due to Unity 2017]). No new controller support to report here.
• Very, very minor performance improvement along with a bit of game code refactoring.
• Various minor menu tweaks along with some menu code refactoring.

[ 2022-07-20 00:02:40 CET ] [ Original post ]

These last two releases focus on Steam's feature: Remote Play Together. At first, a long long time ago, that feature seamed to work with GRITS Racing. Then, it didn't work so well. Then, it didn't work at all, except with keyboard input. With some updates from both Steam and Rewired, we finally took a dive back into this. Turns out, the biggest problem was that one of us was running Steam's beta channel. Anyhow, with that corrected and some of these other fixes in place, Remote Play Together seems to be working great. (This, of course, was all on Windows and I suspect the Linux and Mac builds are easier to work out with Steam.) Remote Play Together appears to be limited to 4 players... and we haven't tested this limit yet... or if more can be jacked in locally plus the 3 remotes (depending on controller types and Steam Input settings). IMPORTANT: As part of this fix, to update for Steam Controllers and Steam's virtual Steam Input controllers, go into the Controller Settings menu and select the Restore Defaults button.

Version 0.3.11

Fixes:

• Rewired wasn't mapping the two stick buttons correctly for the Steam Controller. Fixed locally -- the fix will be sent to the Rewired dev for inclusion in future updates.

Changes:

• Various menu wording and order changes. No significant new content.

Version 0.3.10

Updates:

• Updated Rewired from v1.1.29.4 to v1.1.39.1. Most critically, this brings in some Steam virtual controller hotplug fixes. As usual, this also adds support for more controllers.

Changes:

• Enlarged the spark particle sizes to make the sparks effect more visible.

[ 2021-04-24 07:58:45 CET ] [ Original post ]

It's been quiet here for a few months so I wanted to update everyone on the status of development on GRITS Racing. First, the project is not dead even though I can't say there has been a lot of interest in GRITS. I get it, I haven't given anyone a game worth talking about yet. Rather than trying to compete with all the other games in this genre, I tried finding something new. I own the failures there. There does, however, seem to be a tiny fan base and sales do trickle in. Not enough, however, to pay any bills with. Thus, much of my time lately has been spent looking for work and/or working small contracts. That is also where I'll be for the next few months. Considering that I don't do well in tech interviews and tech quizzes (I'm just not geeky-cool enough), finding work is no small task. No one looks at the work you actually do or your references anymore. They certainly don't care about how productive you are with real-world challenges. So it seems the occasional freelance work is all I'm good for these days. Those who know my other game-dev work (mostly found on itch.io) know that I also often spend time on weekend side projects (currently, Sendit Soccer -- too early to show off yet). I will continue to do so, as well as maybe putting some of that weekend time into GRITS. Other than that, the current plan is to come back to GRITS full time for a few weeks here and there to get bigger updates and new tracks out. I am also putting some serious consideration into what a single-player spinoff of GRITS should look like. Bigger tracks, no playground rules, serious racing, stuff like that. There's some solid physics modeling here that shouldn't go to waste. The hope is that maybe these two games (weird party game and semi-serious racing game) could help promote each other as a bundle. Regardless, I need to finish the single-player features of GRITS first (such as leaderboards) before I can jump into that.

[ 2020-10-10 22:10:41 CET ] [ Original post ]

Prison Dodgecar minigame is back! The best 6-8 player couch minigame on the planet! Was it gone? Well, sort of. While working on adding the team-selection feature, I noticed I had broken the primary feature of Prison Dodgecar some time ago. Apparently, it broke when I added the feature that allows drivers to fall out of their cars in collisions (which is not used in Prison Dodgecar). The feature I broke was the attachment of the Tesla Shields to the car. Without that, Prison Dodgecar is a pretty lame bumper-car game. Boo! Now, it's a TS-powered bumper-car game again! Yay! In other news, I was wrong in my prediction that the next feature added might be the leaderboards. That one is a huge push as the leaderboards are not simple for this game. Having a team selector for the minigames was another gaping hole in basic features and, being a much smaller feature to add, I chose to do it before getting to the leaderboards. Bummer, eh?

Version 0.3.9

Fixes:

• Car-mounted Tesla Shields in Prison Dodgecar are working again.

New features:

• Team-selector menu for the minigames.

[ 2020-07-06 23:23:38 CET ] [ Original post ]

Features or content? That is a tough question at times when choosing what to work on next. This time, I chose features since many features that should make this game more attractive are still missing. At long last, you can finally enter your own driver names. Most of the Western European accent characters are also supported (use the X and Y buttons to change the keyboard key). Names are saved for later easy selection. 100 names can be stored. Saved names can be deleted with a tool found under the Game Options menu. This was also a significant hurdle in the way of getting to the leaderboards feature. I suspect I'll get to the leaderboards next as it is pretty important to those solo players. Still so much to do. I had hoped to get to name entry sooner but it was no small amount of work to do it right. Building menu features in Unity is a lot more work than just about any other tool. Building menu features for the player punch-in windows is even more work since you lose what little help Unity gives you when building UI for simultaneous players and you have to build the event and focus system yourself. I had a good foundation in place from the early punch-in windows... but it was still maybe 60 hours of work. Time like that is hard to find in a world where you are desperate for work but somehow not cool enough to be hired by anybody anymore. New features:

• Name selection and new name entry and storage.

[ 2020-06-16 00:49:03 CET ] [ Original post ]

With 6 of the planned 24 tracks now built (well, prototyped) it seemed time to start fiddling with Endurance Racing mode so players can select their favorite track and hit it harder. This is not really Endurance Racing as planned but it is sorta close. The biggest missing feature is the yellow-flag one. Currently, Endurance Racing is just a single-track championship run with more laps. The yellow-flag feature is intended to take that one step further by pausing the race every 10 laps or so to allow one of the trailing players to change up the rules with the usual Wacky Wodifier selection. Working out how to reconcile such changes mid-race, however, will take some time. Thus, I chose not to wait for that before allowing entry into this mode. (Besides, the menu work alone to get this working was a big enough lift [UI work in Unity is about 100x more work than it should be... and why we don't have better menus yet].) A quick A.I. cheat was also added to Endurance Racing until I have time to build the real solution (whatever that may be). A.I. cars cannot (under most circumstances) lose more than 2 wheels in enduro mode. This is to help keep them relevant longer. Considering the A.I. smarts that still need to be built, this doesn't feel like much of a cheat yet. It's tempting to call this a bigger update than I am calling it, but I don't want to call it bigger until I have time to build more interest into Endurance Racing. Changes:

• Wandle track redux with traffic cones replacing many of the large tires
• A lot of menu code refactored under the hood (it all looks the same)

New:

• Endurance Racing pre-apha introduced

[ 2020-01-30 07:07:44 CET ] [ Original post ]

This update doesn't bring much many will care about but it brings something important for us: It allows us to the check the "full controller support" box in Steam for better exposure. Previously, Unity's default game launcher window was disqualifying this tag because it requires a keyboard or mouse to navigate. Thus, I finally added in-game screen and graphics settings to the Game Options menu and set the Unity launcher to only appear on request. (If you are running on Mac and it is already set to appear from before this update, you can turn if off yourself with this checkbox in that window: [x] Only show this dialog if the option key is down.) Our massive Linux community will also be happy to be caught up on updates (namely, the new Italian Mini Prix track). This also puts us in a better position for when the Atari VCS finally launches. While console builds do not need graphics options like this, it is not yet clear how we may first launch on the Atari because they are being annoyingly quiet in communicating with developers. So, if we can only run on the Atari through side loading, well, we're now set for a keyboard/mouse-free experience there (after install, I hope). New features:

• Screen and graphics options added to the Game Options menu.

Changes:

• Rewired updated to v1.1.29.4. As far as GRITS Racing is concerned, this adds support for the Stadia controller, and some other minor fixes to a few other controllers.

[ 2020-01-22 08:26:31 CET ] [ Original post ]

On the heals of the last release which brought a small but fundamental change, here comes another small but fundamental change. I have kicked the AI NPC cars out of the race when you are playing with several friends. After all, playing against friends should be about playing against friends and not the AI. And, well, it seems 6 cars is chaotic enough, which makes 12 cars just plain absurd. This also allowed me to find a simple solution to the AI UI problem: the AI now have trucks with the usual lap counters (I had not done this previously because space is reserved for only 8 players here). This also has the nice side effect that single-player mode feels more interactive. AIs are still limited to 1 car each. Anyhow, here's the rundown of when AI cars will appear: 1-2 players = 4 AI cars 3 players = 3 AI cars 4 players = 2 AI cars 5 players = 1 AI car 6-8 players = 0 AI cars The more aggressive AI personalities are eliminated first. 0.3.5 changes:

• Player count vs AI count changes.
• Trucks and lap counting for AIs added.
• Checkered flag added on win.

[ 2020-01-19 02:36:57 CET ] [ Original post ]

The Rosa Camuna mini GP track is finally ready for testing (loosely based on a minified Monza). It was a long haul in part due to some awesome tool writing to make this and future tracks easier to build. I hope you all enjoy it as much as I do. Certainly not a beginner's track (you can't full throttle all of it; and be careful with the funky grip on the concrete banking). You'll currently find it at track 6 in an 8-track lineup. This release also brings a big change to a basic mechanic: max speeds. I noticed many players were very happy with the max speed of the fat-tire car setup. Well, that setup is 17% slower than the base setup. Thus, I did some testing that I should have done long ago to see just how slow I could tolerate the max speed and still feel fast and dangerous. To skip the long story of the deep look I took at things, I landed at cutting the base max speed 15% from 200 kph to 170 kph (124 mph to 106 mph). Conversely, I increased the max speed for the big-tire setups. I didn't dig into the gearbox, so the torques should be the same as before. I think this saner pace is a good move for the majority of players and is pretty close to final, if not final. Now, don't worry, speed freaks. I then added a new wacky wodifier for a higher speed limit for all tire setups. This wod increases the max speed 18% which kicks that 170 kph back up to 200.6 kph (just a smidge faster than the original setup). I currently call the wod "Speed limit for pros." Summary of changes wrapped up in this release: Version 0.3.2:

• Some small AI tweaks including new behavior in the pit lane.
• Other minor changes such as curbs fixed.

Version 0.3.3:

• New track: Rosa Camuna
• New object type: traffic cones

Version 0.3.4:

• Max speed redux.
• New Wacky Wodifier: Speed limit for pros
• New Leader Lamifier: Greasier car seat
• Wods listbox now scrollable... no thanks to Unity's crazy UI tools!
• Changed 4-track screenshot layout to a quad instead of a vertical strip.

Linux should see a new build shortly, after I make a few more changes in this current hard push.

[ 2020-01-16 12:08:29 CET ] [ Original post ]

Admittedly, GRITS Racing is a small fish in a big pond... so... time to find out what it is like to be a small fish in a much smaller pond. Thus, I took the plunge to run and release a build for Linux. It was a bit of trouble -- and perhaps a waste of time -- but not that bad as most tools were ready to go for Linux. Also, this paves the way for building for the Atari VCS when it arrives. More on the Linux build further down. 0.3.1 updates:

• Wwise plugin updated from 2018.1.6 to 2018.1.10 to fix a bug in the Linux build.

Windows and Mac will likely not see a build of version 0.3.1 since I see nothing else in the plugin update that would affect the game much on those platforms. In other news (for my November update) I hope to start work on a new track soon even though my new job is sucking a lot out of me with their insanely-complex proprietary tools they build their simulator with. We'll see. I also see I need to move the game towards "full controller support" sooner than previously prioritized so I can jump on the new "Remote Play on TV" tag in Steam. To do this, I need to expand the options menu to include settings currently handled by Unity's launcher. Steam tagged GRITS Racing for their new "Remote Play Together" feature but I haven't tested it yet. But, for those asking for online multiplayer support, maybe this will work well enough for now.

Linux

Regarding the Linux build, here's the excerpt from our readme: A Linux build has just been added to the OS offering. Future Linux support is not guaranteed. Currently, 64-bit Ubuntu 18.04 with Nvidia drivers is the only supported configuration, and is not yet considered a high priority. At time of release, the Linux build has only been tested on Linux Mint 19.2 64-bit (Ubuntu 18.04 base). This was on a pretty outdated mid-2010 Mac Mini with a 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo and a GeForce 320M and performance was good with the "Faster (2x AA)" game option (8x AA was too slow). OpenGL 3.2 or later is required. This would roughly include Nvidia since 2006 (GeForce 8), AMD since 2006 (Radeon HD 2000), and Intel since 2012 (HD 4000/IvyBridge). Good luck with drivers other than Nvidia. The SLD2 library must be installed if not already. Hint: sudo apt install libsdl2-2.0-0 The Unity Launcher may require other libraries such as libcanberra-gtk-?. If having trouble, launch from the command line to see any messages.

[ 2019-11-17 07:58:33 CET ] [ Original post ]

Version 0.3.0 doesn't add much that will be noticeable over the last 0.2.x version -- it is more of a wrap to all the 0.2.x edits. That said, there was still a ton of hard work behind this update. Most of that was on those barely-noticeable shadows. The shadow controllers were rebuilt, and then rebuilt again, until I found the right setup for optimal performance with shadows on both static and dynamic objects as well as optimal track editing. Thus, just about every object was updated (and updated again) even if not significantly so. New features:

• All objects (of any significant height) now have a shadow (of one sort or another). This adds a tiiiiiny bit more depth to the track. Sometimes I think it works well... and sometimes I think it is silly looking and not worth the effort. We'll see where it goes from here.

Fixes:

• The larger/wider wheels now show the smoke and dust they generate (only the standard wheels were doing this correctly before). The wheel shadow for the larger wheels was also on the wrong layer. Not sure why these things weren't fixed much sooner. I suspect I had noticed it during smoke/dust development, and then forgotten in some rush to publish. But, I really can't remember. Regardless, I can't believe it took me this long to notice and fix the smoke/dust problem.
• Many, many, other minor tweaks and sprite updates not worth listing.

[ 2019-09-25 19:24:53 CET ] [ Original post ]

Updates:

• The drag chute has finally received the attention to detail that pretty much everything else has. This isn't final polish yet, but at least it is more than the quick test feature that it used to be. There is new art and the chute inflates with motion. The collider on the chute has finally been enabled after resolving most scenarios where the chute might get stuck on the wrong side of the track barriers. This can still happen through no direct fault of the driver, but the precise scenario is extremely rare and, thus, dubbed part of the chaos of the game (don't get rear-ended while diagonally backed into a wall). Anyhow, the chute can now get tangled on some objects such as other cars -- but this feature has been made to also be fairly forgiving and should untangle fairly easily.

[ 2019-09-17 23:30:51 CET ] [ Original post ]

New features:

• New Wacky Wodifier: Greased car seats. This is my new favorite wod. It's for those who think the drivers are a little too glued to their seats considering these jalopies have no seat belts. I'm tempted to make this the only race mode and cancel all the other wods. I won't... I don't think... well, not anytime soon.

Changes:

• Wandle track (the figure-8) has been made a bit easier by moving the barrier tires 2 meters further back from the race line.
• Some sprite updates and tweaks.

[ 2019-09-13 02:19:52 CET ] [ Original post ]

Some cleanup of things missed in all the work of the last release. Fixes:

• Pedestrian cursor was being drawn on the wrong layer.

Other minor sprite tweaks.

[ 2019-09-13 02:10:33 CET ] [ Original post ]

This update brings some significant features and updates and -- if you haven't tried GRITS Racing in a while -- now would be a good time to try it again.

Update summary:

0.2.9 new features:

• Drivers can now fall out of the car during hard collisions... BOOM!
• AI agents can also fall out. If their car is still workable they run to it. If not, they run away until they hit a wall and jump over (really, they just disappear for now).
• Tesla Shields remain on even when in your car (but it takes a close hit to the cockpit to trigger it). This protects you from t-bones... but mostly helps to unstick the huggy types.
• New car art and palette tweaking to improve color identification and car direction

0.2.10 new features:

• "Jousting lances" Wacky Wodifier added
• Wacky Wodifier selection now appears before the first track in addition to between tracks. (Some players may not like this change but I need to try it out. Let me know.)

The backstory to the design work:

Most important to me with this update is that the base game is finally approaching the level of silliness I had first imagined for the game. This was brought about by adding a feature that allows the driver to fall out of the car in hard collisions (and partly by leaving the Tesla Shield on while driving). This is a feature that has been discussed for a long time but, honestly, I didn't give it enough weight before because I was hesitant to spend time on the technical challenge of it. I felt other things were more important early on and that losing wheels would reach the level of silliness I was hoping for with this game. I was wrong. The loose wheels bring as much frustration as they do fun. More fun chaos was needed... and I wasn't terribly sure what that should be. The sequence of events that led me here is this: I wanted Wodifier selection to start before the first track and not just between tracks (because many don't play the game long enough to discover this whole other level to the game). To do that, I needed one more Wod to have 8 Wods for an 8-track race. When looking at my todo list of Wods, I decided to go for the jousting lances next for whatever reason (it was a gut feel). The original alpha plan for the lances was to maybe just trigger the Wheel-eject button when hitting a driver -- thus, forcing the driver out of the car soon after that. But, while dwelling on this for a few days, I was continually bugged by the thought that literally unseating the driver instead sounds much more fun than knocking the wheels off. So, after thinking through all the work that needed to be done to make this happen, I decided to go for it. And, the first step for that was -- guess what? -- actually placing the driver object in the car object (instead of object replacement like I was cheating before) and making the driver unseatable with a breakable joint. Hence, a driver that can also fall out during a hard collision. It was a beautiful thing when first testing this, and I was sold. D'uh! I already had a feature of drivers on foot.... So why not just exploit that code more? Should have been more obvious to me. I'm also extremely happy with the resulting code from the refactoring. While some things are indeed more complicated with the new features, much of the code is now cleaner because some things are easier or more straight forward now that the driver object is always on screen for the duration of the race (unless you are an AI agent that chose to runaway after destroying your car). This object-compilation change also triggered the long-awaited art changes to the car. The new car art includes a hood that is slightly wider and is now much more close to what was originally envisioned. A common complaint has been that the cars can get too hard to identify when things get messy. So, even though the cars are tiny and will remain tiny, my hope was to improve color-identification of cars by 20% or so with more car-paint pixels. I think I just might have accomplished that. Yes, this is not a huge improvement but, hopefully, it will be enough of one. Also, with a much-larger and much-more-realistic cockpit size, hopefully the front end of the car is also now more apparent. The darker colors have also been lightened a bit (while still staying true to their international racing color origins). The rest of the palette has also been tweaked to improve color saturation where shaded colors were desaturated for no good reason. There are more sprite art tweaks coming, so stay tuned (not to mention the art overhaul at some unknown point). After all that, jousting lances could finally be added (not that it went down in that exact order -- there was a lot of parallel development). The lances brought about plenty of their own game-design challenges. They aren't as fun as they sound... and probably never will be. Thus, it was tempting a few times to stop work on them. The cars are simply too high speed and twitchy, and the world is too open, for formal jousting to happen well (and, thus, I call the Wod "Jousting lances" and not "Jousting"). I kept working it, however, until I found a design that makes me fairly happy with them. Again, a lot of refactoring throughout the game to make them work as I eventually worked it out through much testing. The end result is not terribly easy to use for unseating other drivers... but still fairly enjoyable with how they interact in the physics environment. Expect maybe only one satisfying lance hit per race. I have cheated the width of the glove on the end of the lance as wide as I feel I can get away with (about 50cm) for the style of this game... but I'm not terribly sure I won't tweak it wider later. Note that hitting the driver with the glove is typically required to unseat the driver with the lance. Hitting with the shaft of the lance typically won't do it -- nor sliding back on the shaft to hit with the glove -- the hit has to originate with the glove. Also, I'm pretty confident the first request many will make for future lance work is to make them steerable. Hmm... I'm thinking on how best to do this and am open to suggestions on how exactly they should steer... of the three or so options I currently see.

[ 2019-09-08 07:32:25 CET ] [ Original post ]

Say hello to the new Wandle figure-8 track! (Based on the recently-demolished Wimbledon Stadium track in England -- and the same size as near as I could measure from satellite photos.) I placed it at track 3 in the lineup and moved 3 to 5. I hope ya'll like it as much as I do. This track took quite a bit longer than hoped due to the additional features built for it and/or built for other tracks because of it. About 200 hours. It has simpler art than tracks before it but, hopefully, it is sufficient until we can come back and redo all the art.
Also, included here, for the ultra curious, is a photo of some of the physics rigging (the green lines) that goes on behind the scenes in these tracks. As you can see, it's no small amount of work to rig up a track for all the features the game offers. This update skips v0.2.7 (the new track) and went to v0.2.8 due to the new features that came with the new track shebang. Some of the new features/fixes that add to making a mess:

• Breakable barriers! Regarding barriers that are not critical for keeping the player on screen, or out of certain areas, many of these are now either no longer nailed down or are nailed down with breakable nails. Not all tracks can make use of this feature but the one's that do should now be just a tiny bit more interesting to crash around on.
• The lighter-weight track objects not nailed down (such as hay bales) now show their damage about as quick as everything else. This was done by adding mass into the equation for damage on dynamic objects.
• Tires used as barriers now show damage. Currently, they "lose their paint" and get darker with damage.
• Barrier tires now come in many more colors thanks to rewriting some stuff to make this both simpler and more flexible. A win-win.

Fixes:

• The drop point for new cars is now adjusted according to width of tires attached (another happy side effect of refactoring stuff for this figure-8 track). There should be no more pit wall crowding/entanglements when getting a new car with a wide tire setup. Eventually, I hope to animate the new car event with car drawers and a crane.

In other news, still job hunting so time on this game is hard to guess and manage. The next track will probably be a mini Suzuka but we'll see. The current plan is to work on the remaining tracks in the same order as the order of colors/flags on the punch-in screen. Thus, it could be a while before I finish minifying Monaco (the choice of Tootsie the Purple Privateer). Before the next track, however, I need to build more Wodifiers and work out some other things holding things up. Finally, in case anyone is keeping track, this game update serves as the August news post. I don't plan to write a separate news post in months where I expect to publish an update. As always... Thanks for playing!... and party on!!!

[ 2019-08-21 10:43:45 CET ] [ Original post ]

This is more of a hotfix than an upgrade. This implements a small visual change in the menus. The rest of what follows in this post is just a tl;dr peek behind the scenes. I had made a previous claim that the next update would be the next track. Well, that is still true, depending on point of view over hotfixes. Regarding that track, the background art is now complete (if not simplistic for now). The track will also need some new code because it needs to place trucks in a new way (and maybe the cars and drivers too). So, a day for coding a new track feature, a couple more long and hard days for rigging, and it should be done... that is, whenever I can find time for those long days. Back to the hotfix. While working on the next track, I became distracted by something I noticed in the notes on the sales returns. 1/4 of the returns were claiming that the game had no support for keyboard control. ??? Okay, I get it, the placeholder text I had for the buttons have been very misleading with keyboard players trying to do things with the ABXY keys... instead of what the ABXY gamepad buttons are mapped to on the keyboard for players 1 and 2. But, still, "no" keyboard support? Did they not try the arrow keys and Enter and Escape, which are always on for menu navigation regardless of how the game controls are mapped (WASD+MKJI, etc)? Okay, I also get that many people will abuse Steam's return policy and just make up reasons for a return just to get a game for free. Some may even briefly look around in the game for some stupid excuse to feel more "legit" about their activities. Regardless, my placeholder text was long overdue for replacement. Ideally, I would make the menu responsive to the inputs it sees. But, I've got many higher priorities than that right now. Heck, I'm not even at Steam's "Full Controller Support" yet (I need to write a replacement to Unity's launch window to earn that sales gimmick). Who buys a car sim expecting great keyboard control anyhow? Anyways... I took a small amount of time to draw some placeholder button icons to replace the placeholder button text. This doesn't directly help the keyboard players who can't bear to look around for one of the many places I've posted the default keyboard commands... or to use the Controller Setup feature in the game menus to define their own keyboard commands (and who also can't bear to ask anything before making a return). The hope is, however, that these icons will help inspire keyboard players to look a little deeper for the key mappings to the buttons. Don't know, but it's the best I can do right now for this console-first game. I do care about keyboard control. I test with it regularly and put quite a bit of thought into it. The keys have the same gravity as the buttons and d-pad they map to. Regarding the button art, I wanted something fairly universal to help players find the right button regardless of what kind of controller they are using (including the keyboard). That's how I ended up with these silly paw-print-looking icons. But, hey, it's a silly game that is nowhere near final menu art yet. We'll see if it works for players or not. Another common keyboard complaint is that keyboard control is too hard. Well, frankly, so is gamepad control for many players -- and the keyboard is not much different (but, yes, somewhat more awkward to manipulate than a gamepad). I've put maybe 1,000 hours into the physics behind these cars and their handling. That probably sounds like too much time in an indie game. That's why I often say this game has more realistic physics than perhaps a 2D party game should have. Most of that was probably spent on testing and tweaking to find a car that feels really good to both me and to novices. There were some helpful ideas on the net for setting up the physics on a 2D car... but none of them were correct on all points. Thus, everything here was built from the ground up, and checked and rechecked. Some things stumped me for quite a while. Many discoveries were made only through long testing sessions when things just didn't "feel" right. Once, I spent a week or two just looking for where I was going wrong somewhere in the transmission and power-train code. It felt like something was off by about 5x. I could have just fudged the correction... but that's not me. When I did find the mistake, I calculated things were actually off by 4.8. Trust your gut. Fudging, no matter how creative, invariable leads to something someone will notice and not like. (Well, I guess everything on the planet invariably leads to something someone will not like... but that doesn't make fudging any more acceptable. I'm not fudge-free either though. Some things just don't fit in the budget or the machine specs.) So, yeah, the cars can be hard to control at first but, if they were easier, they wouldn't be nearly as interesting. Hopefully, I'm not the only one that sees it that way. The cars are tuned to where most players should get the hang of them in the first 60 seconds. After a minute or two, most players should feel like they are mostly in control even though they may not feel "good" at it yet. I achieved this while maintaining interesting collisions and such through a secret-sauce of driving aids. More aid than I, personally, prefer (for example, it's harder to get into a donut than it should be), but it is what seems to be well balanced for most casual players. I hope you like the effort. Matt Jernigan

[ 2019-07-17 06:15:32 CET ] [ Original post ]

There are no major developments to report this month. I spent most of June looking for a publisher for GRITS Racing to help push development along faster. Most indie publishers don't bother responding... and, well, that is not surprising these days. Of the ones that did, I got one nibble, but nothing else to report on that front. It is hard to promote a game that is both an old genre and not visually interesting yet. The next track, a British-style figure-8 track, got a small start in that I completed the engineering drawing for it (photo attached). Curiously, this track did not need to be minified. I also made a rough sketch of mini-Suzuka (seen in the background), another figure-8 track (due to flattening the bridge). Plans have also been written down for how to minify Monaco. Monaco is looking like it will be the craziest of the 12 mini-realism tracks (with a suicide lane planned)... but not as crazy as what the fantasy tracks might bring. Anyhow, due to taking time to chase publishers, I still need to finish up a small contract and then look for what most people call a real job (like, maybe, being a greeter at Walmart) before I can return to working on GRITS Racing. Thanks again for taking time to follow development on our game. Matt Jernigan

[ 2019-07-07 00:45:07 CET ] [ Original post ]

I wish to be as transparent as possible and to update the fans of GRITS Racing on the status of the game at least once a month during slow development periods. The good news is that discounted early-access sales continue to trickle in. Fans also continue to trickle in on the Steam community and on wishlisting the game. The bad news is, as mentioned in the news post for the last version update, my savings has finally run dry and I must pause to look for other work. Thus, between working on a small contract, looking for work, and maintaining my patches for old Sierra games, I haven't had much time left for GRITS Racing these last few weeks. I usually don't give the game patches priority over GRITS Racing -- so don't worry about my priorities there -- many of the fixes that I could add to that collection have been on hold since I started full-time work on GRITS Racing in August 2017 and will remain on hold. Once I get my finances above water again, work on GRITS Racing will resume to whatever degree I can manage. We're at only version 0.2.x and there is still a ton of work planned before we get to version 1.0 (not to mention features already on the version 2.0 wish list, as well as features for spinoff games). The British figure-8 track is still planned for the next update. After that, I will probably alternate between more mini Grand Prix tracks (Italy, Japan, France, GB, Belgium, Netherlands, and one unknown, perhaps Monaco) and more Wacky Wodifiers. Then, hard to say of the many things left after that. If you haven't tried the updates yet that came in April and May, give the latest version a try. The A.I. cars, banking (not visible in the art yet), smoke and dust add quite a bit to the game over versions 0.1.x. The game is struggling to find its audience, partly, I figure, because I haven't discovered how to break through the noise yet. Also, party games on PCs aren't much of a seller, regardless. Then again, maybe it's best the game hasn't gotten any coverage from influencers yet because there is still so much more to do before it's in a good position to make a good first impression with most players. I'm also starting to look at the Xbox One in addition to the originally-targeted Switch and secondary Atari VCS. Maybe GRITS Racing should be added to this Xbox One List of games with 8 player local support (a list which is surely out of date now). Thank you to all of our fans! You make the absurd risk of building this equally-absurd game worth it. Matt Jernigan

[ 2019-06-01 23:06:16 CET ] [ Original post ]

New features:

• 10 laps added as an option (retail version)
• Tabletop Mode now rotates the Wacky Wodifiers menu 4 ways instead of just the 2 long edges

In other news, expect updates to come slower because the early-access release isn't selling well enough for any of us to remain full time on this project. This game is begging for a console release but it's not clear how to get it there at the moment. Meanwhile, please stay tuned for more tracks or whatever else comes next.

[ 2019-05-16 08:16:51 CET ] [ Original post ]

New features:

• Tabletop Mode! Added by request. Find it under Game Options. This doesn't change any gameplay or mechanics (currently) but allows players during punch-in to set what side of the table they are viewing from, and it changes the controller accordingly. Meant for venues with tabletop computers, those few individuals with tabletop computers, and those other people crazy enough to lay their TVs on their backs on the coffee table... or to hang projectors from the ceiling pointed at the floor.
• The Controller Setup menu now saves changes to disk.

Fixes:

• Some pause menu funkiness with multiple players has been eliminated.
• Controllers not associated with a punched-in player are now completely disabled during a game.

[ 2019-05-03 03:07:31 CET ] [ Original post ]

New features:

• Smoke and dust emitters added to the wheels.
• Increased the spark emitters for 60% more sparks.

Yesterday I decided that I could probably finish up the smoke and dust effects by the end of the day. And, so I did. I had started work on them nearly a year ago but then they got shelved for whatever reason. Not sure why it took me so long to come back around to it. Maybe I wanted to build the other heavy performance stuff before committing to this many emitters. Yesterday, I had planned to include them with another update in the queue but decided today this update was too fun to wait another couple days.

[ 2019-05-01 02:44:27 CET ] [ Original post ]

New features:

• AI cars can now pitstop when needing repairs. Not all AI personalities will choose to do so, however. I can't say they're terribly smart about it yet... and it can be a bit humorous to watch them trying to figure it out with the wheels they have left.

Given that racing against just the AI seems to get most interesting after 15 laps, I'm considering opening up the longer race options on the demo version. I haven't done so yet. Just considering it.

[ 2019-04-28 08:08:32 CET ] [ Original post ]

New features:

• AI drivers added to the Bubba Prizes and Championship Rankings when playing with less than 3 players.
• AI drivers can now brake for hairpin turns (can't say they're good at hairpins yet... but at least they aren't hopeless on the Finger Lakes GP track now).

In other news, I believe I'll use the recently-demolished Wimbledon Stadium in London as the model for the final oval track (in figure-8 mode, of course) before moving on to the remaining 7 GP tracks.

[ 2019-04-25 01:28:11 CET ] [ Original post ]

Welcome to GRITS Racing version 0.2.0! The long-awaited AI has finally been added to our early-access game. This is just the first round of the AI and, thus, it is not complete yet. The 5 personalities I built for the 4 cars (one of the personalities changes depending on number of players) are behaving more or less as I had hoped. You can expect more personality tweaking to come but, primarily, what is missing from the AI agents are pit stops and braking, to make them more competitive and/or interesting. The AI agents know how to find the pit lane, when they choose to (which is rare at the moment), but they don't yet know when or how to make a pit stop. The AI agents only get one car apiece, and that probably won't change. Also, originally, I hadn't planned to program pit stops into the AI either (not intentional pit stops anyhow) -- they were originally specced to be more of the environment than the race -- but testing as a single player has shown that at least some of the AI agents should go for a pit stop when they need to -- particularly with a small number of players. Otherwise, it is too easy to knock them out of the race to kill the competition... which is boring when playing alone, and maybe in two-player mode as well. The AI currently knows how to let off the gas when over-committed to a turn... but this is not enough. They really need to also know which turns to slow down for ahead of time, and by how much. Thus, they are currently pretty stupid about turn 5 on the Finger Lakes grand prix track and will quickly destroy themselves on this track. Enough of what's missing, what about what is included in this update? Much like how I went overly crazy with the physics in the game, I did a similar thing with the AI. I've mentioned before that I didn't want just another racing game with AI cars chasing a bunch of waypoints around the track. And, so, I didn't do that. I do have a few waypoints on each track because I need three or four just to keep the agents pointed in the right direction around the track. After that, however, it's up to the AI agent to decide how best to get from one point to another, or how to best recover from a wreck. To allow for this, I create a navigation mesh for each track with different navigation areas of different cost within that mesh. Then, I use A* pathfinding for long-distance navigation decisions and context steering for local navigation decisions. This gives the agents a lot of freedom to express their personalities, but also comes with a lot of settings to tweak and it could take a while to dial it all in. The current AI personalities are these:

• Claude: a.k.a. "Speed Racer" against 1 player, medium "Speed Racer" against 2 players, and "Traffic Ma'am" against 3+
• Bob: a.k.a. "Student Driver"
• Rob: a.k.a. "Wrong Way Ray" occasionally gets turned around
• Maud: a.k.a. "Heat Seeker" tries her best to follow the race leader without hitting the race leader (which is not always possible)

This update also brings a banked-turn feature. Don't expect perfectly-calculated 3D banking, however. I do a lot of faking when it comes to the third dimension in this 2D game to save on processing where it would not be terribly significant. I do calculate speed-relative downforce increases on the individual wheels in a bank ("Isn't that enough?"), but banks are also mostly non-directional (that is, don't expect to roll downhill when sitting idle on a bank). The banking feature was needed now versus later because it affects setting up the AI agents. Currently, there is no visible indication of which turns are banked and by how much. We'll get there.

• The major turns in the tri-oval are heavily banked and the finish-line turn is medium banked. You can now drop the hammer in the tri-oval. Yay!!! Makes for a better novice-level entry track as well.
• The red-clay oval has no banking. (The real track it is based on is banked at only 4.3 degrees and is banked evenly throughout the track.)
• The yellow-clay oval has light banking in the turns.
• Turns 2 and 5 on the grand prix track are lightly banked. (I perhaps cheated a bit on turn 5 versus the real track.)

I had also planned to not include the AI agents much in the UI stuff but I feel I should change that soon. This includes things like AI lap counters (not sure where to fit those in yet) and including the AI in Bubba Prizes and the championship standings with only one or two players. Hopefully, these things will come shortly. Then, it's on to finally implementing name entry and high-score storage. Then, back to track making, I hope. Love 'em or hate 'em, let us know what you think of the AI personalities. It's all trial-and-error at this early stage.

[ 2019-04-23 01:32:35 CET ] [ Original post ]

Anyone who has read the how-to-play notes, and played GRITS Racing for more than a few minutes, hopefully understands that this game is not just another top-down, shared-screen racing game with canned mechanics. It's not easy finding depth in shared-screen multiplayer games. There are easily more than 100 top-down racing games that came before GRITS Racing. Many of them also shared-screen. Thus, the basic design for GRITS Racing started with an intent to search for depth in places not yet seen in shared-screen racers. As a result, we don't use any canned mechanics found in many shovelware racing games (other than a lap counter and clock to trigger the win condition). Yes, we use a game engine to handle the graphics and platform porting. We also use a physics engine, audio engine, and gamepad package, to handle other high- and low-level things we don't need to reinvent. This gives us the maximum amount of time to focus on building original mechanics for things like how the car moves and handles, and how to interact with the environment. I chose 2D instead of 3D because in 2D I can put about 4 times the number of physics objects on screen at the same processing impact. This added depth of physics interactions outweighed anything 3D might have given us -- particularly at such small scale. I basically traded vehicle rollovers for more track objects and debris. Furthermore, if I really don't need that many more physics objects, I can divert some of that power to other things such as a wider range of game modifiers, special effects, and more interesting AI. So, that is where the AI is at. The original plans for the AI calls for AI cars that do more than just chase waypoints around the track like most racing games do. And I'm not talking about building more strategic AIs either. The more advanced racing games have that already... and, well, advanced racing strategies is not what GRITS Racing is about. No, the original game design called for AIs with 4 to 6 different personalities -- and not necessarily racing personalities either. That will take some significant time to build. Thus, we made the decision to release GRITS Racing before the AI was built. That has proven to be a mistake because the lack of AI is not making a good first impression when players test the game alone. Thus, this "racing" game is now in a Catch-22 position. Do I release an update sooner with simple AI? Or, do I wait until the AI itself can make a good first impression when the AI features are finally announced and released? It seems I should maybe go the simple AI route but the problem there is that it will create false expectations and maybe even upset a few when the AI behavior changes completely. I will likely look for some middle ground as I dig into the AI capabilities more, and start with semi-interesting AIs that I then improve as we push towards the full release. We'll see where it goes. No promises on specific AI features yet. The interesting AI hopes may prove to be a dud in testing.

[ 2019-03-09 00:24:15 CET ] [ Original post ]

After much ado that is, after weeks of battling off the crazed, fried-grits-eating hordes trying to climb over the barbed wire around our highly-secure #gamedev complex, trying to get their hands on an alpha version of our game after months of 3 a.m. pushes to get just one more feature completed after years of living small in an apartment not much bigger than a refrigerator box GRITS Racing is finally seeing an early-access launch at an early-access price. To be clear about the current state and future of GRITS Racing: The current alpha version is very solid on the core game mechanics. It is light, however, on content, animation, sound FX, and other polish. Namely, only 4 of the planned 24 tracks are built thus far (fan art will be considered to help this along contact us for details). It is also light on single-player features at the moment. Namely, the AI cars and the leaderboards are lacking on that front. The plan is to build GRITS Racing into a solid, medium-sized indie game worth about twice the current price, and to launch on consoles as well. How quickly any of that happens will depend on interest in the game from the fans. If Matt can continue working full time on the game... he will. (Same as he has been for the last year and a half.) Ideally, version 1.0 might be ready for launch in 12 months or less. More likely, however, Matt will need to halt progress here and there to find other income, and this, of course, will slow progress. Thus, we shall see, and will continue to hope for the best progress on GRITS Racing. Also of note is that Steam is proving hard to work with when it comes to games supporting more than four gamepads on Windows (Mac is fine and Windows without Steam running is fine). Thus, it will likely take time to work out the ideal controller code for Steam and Windows. They have yet to answer our questions as to why they don't allow the developers full control of their Windows controller shims and what the best practice might be to for asking users to turn them off. How is it that they believe they know how to manage the controllers better than the game's developers especially when their method is limited to four controllers? We're dumbfounded. Anyhow, see the readme for information on how to make sure the shims are off and you should be good for up to 8 players on Windows. Thank you for reading about our ambitious launch. Now, if you will, grab some friends and frenemies, a fistful of gamepads, and take GRITS Racing for a spin (either the free demo or the early-access version).

[ 2019-03-04 09:40:15 CET ] [ Original post ]

The new version of the demo doesn't bring any new features, just some fixes. Fixes:

• Updated Rewired package from 1.1.22.2 to 1.1.24.0 to fix the gamepad hotplugging issues.
• Minor tweaks to the gamepad keyboard mappings.
• Better behavior with screens and windows that aren't 16:9.

[ 2019-03-01 20:33:41 CET ] [ Original post ]

First, it was personal circumstances. Then, I failed to package the release properly, so Steam rejected it. It's been ready to go on itch.io for weeks now but Steam's setup is much more difficult with their depots, builds, packaging, etc, scattered among multiple tabs in the settings. Still, my fault there. Then, it bombed in Steam's testing. Much of which was bizarre and we can't reproduce. Some of it valid such as the hotplugging issue. Some of it just outright frustrating because Steam's Windows environment hurts games with more than 4 gamepads than it helps -- and they still provide no clear resolution for that. See the game's readme for more details. Anyhow, I reported the hotplugging bug to the package provider, Rewired, (a bug that wasn't in earlier versions of Rewired) and got an update from them. I'll be releasing a demo update for that shortly. Meanwhile, the wait continues for Steam to slowly test and retest. A good thing, I suppose, but it sure is a black box... and they really need to change the defaults with how they work with gamepads on Windows. The game developer's work for gamepad support should take precidence, and Steam's shims to help or hurt that should be optional. That should be obvious, right?

[ 2019-03-01 00:40:51 CET ] [ Original post ]