Pico Karts is a pseudo-3D racing game, modelled after the style of Outrun or Hang-On! This started from an experiment to produce a pseudo-3D scrolling road, and was gradually built up from that concept to a complete game. While I'm sure there are plenty of things I could add or improve, I'm happy to ship this little project and move on to the next thing :)
Controls:
Left/Right Arrow Keys: Steering
Down Arrow Key: Brake
Z: Accelerate
X: Boost (when boost meter is full)
The boost meter fills up as you drive, and is reset any time you hit an object or drive off the road.
If you'd prefer to switch the colour alignment between the road and the sides of the road, press X at the title screen (this may reduce eye strain for some people).
Courses:
Easy: Gentle curves in the sunny morning. Other drivers maintain a consistent course, and the time limit is generous.
Medium: Desert dunes at dusk. Some tight corners, and some other drivers will swerve across the road. A moderate challenge with some room for error.
Hard: A metropolis at night. Frequent tight turns, erratically swerving drivers, and a brutal time limit with little room for error. A serious challenge.
I'd love to see your top times!
Good, @Soundole, but flat out without Turbo seems kind of slow, like 30mph perhaps, definitely not a high speed. Turbo itself just kicks in the speed of light and that also is not good as you can crash almost immediately.
Suggest you speed up the top speed the player can go normally, like 60mph - and when TURBO is selected it starts to speed up the player, slowly, and have Turbo last about 2-3x the current length it is now.
Once Turbo is burned out, slow down the player, don't just instantly set them back to the slow speed.
Colliding with a car at top speed just stops your own speed. Suggest you BOOM proper explosion with particle fragments. Yes you are placed back on the track but precious time is used up as you explode.
Something else you might add is the screech factor. This is done on almost every racing game today. When the clock counts down if you are just flat holding the accelerator all the way though you screech the tires and don't start as quickly.
But if you gauge to accelerate right when you are to begin, you have a boosted start. You can see this especially in F-Zero for the Nintendo 64.
this is a polished game you have here, worthy of a gold star, and it looks to be going places. Keep it up !
@dw817 Thanks for the thoughtful critique! I'm probably going to go on to other things for now, but I appreciate the ideas! Some of the acceleration stuff would actually be really difficult to implement without rewriting everything, because due to the way that I hacked this together, it's tied to frame rate! Definitely going to be doing that differently in my next racing game!
@dw817 Speaking of F-Zero, the game in the series called Maximum Velocity (One of the Game Boy Advance versions of F-Zero) had a sound cue for when you were going to get a bad start. If you tap A during the countdown to keep the engine in the "rev range" where the pitch of the sound is almost going to become the high-pitched sound that signals a bad start, but you don't let it happen, you'll get a rocket start 🚀
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