Resurrection

It's been eight years, but the website is back. I'll try to post more projects when I have some free time.

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A fresh new website

I needed a distraction from my regular programming for a weekend, so I started recreating my website from scratch. This time I didn't want to cut any corners, and wanted to get a taste of what modern webdev is like. I stopped learning anything about webdev around the early 2000's, and thus, my methods were wildly out of date. I was sticking to tried and true methods such as nested tables, and had very little experience in CSS.

While I doubt I have followed best practices, this page is a big improvement. I wanted to stop using PHP as a crutch and make the entire website static, and therefore developed a static site generator using C#. I made sure the website was 'responsive' as well, aka it resizes properly when the window gets as thin as a phone.

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Added local splitscreen

Now you can grab a gamepad and play against one of your friends on the same screen. It was something I've always wanted to add to Vektor Prix, but the amount of time it would take to adapt the engine properly wasn't worth it. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I could just run two instances of the game, resize them, and connect to eachother through multiplayer automatically.

So I went that route, all that was left to do was polish the transitions and fix the random bugs that pop up from doing something so nonstandard. The only issue left is that Fraps is unable to capture both screens on Windows 8, which means I had to use other tools and deal with a big reduction in recorded video quality. But I'm happy to report that the feature works!

Note: I had no one around to play as player 2 when I recorded these videos just now.

As for other changes: I've fixed the menu transitions so they run at a constant speed, the heads up display resizes itself properly for skinny windows, I've slowed down the tutorial bots, fixed resolution options, and fixed a bunch of misc multiplayer bugs.

Stay tuned, more information coming soon!

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Two weeks in one

This past couple of weeks I've been doing some required final touches.

The first thing I did was zoom the camera out a bit so it is easier to see your surroundings. The camera's zoom amount is adjustable in the options: zooming in will give you better performance, but zooming out will let you see a lot more.

I feel like the new camera capabilities will make the game a bit easier to play. I also noticed that people had a tough time knowing which vehicle was theirs when the race started, so now all of the enemies fade in at the starting line. This makes self-identification extremely easy.

I've finished implementing the final level's unlockables, and therefore the game is beatable and 'complete'. I still have more polish and bugfixes to attend to, but it's a great feeling getting the game to this stage.

The past few weeks I've made a ton of smaller changes as well, such as making the bots more intelligent in close quarters combat, I made the vehicle speed adjustable for custom games, a yolo round where only bots are alive is now skippable (both online and offline), I fixed the force that explosions give vehicles, and adjusted a bunch of particle effects.

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A week in review

This past week I've been focusing on the final level and adjustments to make the game easier in easy mode.

For the final level, I've finally finished all of the dialog as well as the mission structure. I have to finish a couple of the final unlockables, and a bit of polish left to do for the final level, but it is now playable and beatable. Which is pretty exciting for me, since the last chunk of content is finished. Which means it's polish and bugfixing time from here on out.

The second thing I've been focusing on is trying to make the game easier to get into. I've noticed a few things from watching new playtesters and now I'm trying to adjust the game accordingly. The first big change was the speed of the vehicles during a race, it seems like things are just moving too quick for someone starting out. Now easy, medium, and hard modes all have slightly different speeds.

I've also noticed how discouraging it can be to fall far behind in easy mode. So now bots will miss a turn sometimes, crash into walls, and take a worse route if they're in front of the player in easy mode. I've also upped the damage that a player deals to easy bots.

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