Week 10

Luna, Neil and Finnán here, to deliver a post-alpha playtest devlog. In the lead up to the alpha, Luna made new art assets for the cars and implemented a second track with Neil's help, Neil created a track selection screen for the menu, and Finnán worked on an in-game pause screen. Unfortunately however, the car selection screen and the pause screen both provided their share of issues, and we were unable to get them working/fully implemented in time for the alpha; due to this, we were forced to leave them out. A basic tutorial was also created to teach the playtesters how the game worked.

Altogether, the game was in an adequate state for the alpha playtest, aside from an issue with the exit button in the tutorial which prevented it from working and sending the player to the main menu, which we didn't notice beforehand. Apart from this, the playtest itself went decently; the players got the hang of the controls quickly enough, though some found the lack of control adjustment when driving downwards to be confusing. There was a consistent issue spotted throughout, however - when the car went over a jump, it would not land on the ground properly if it landed on another car or the offroad, and instead repeatedly hopped while maintaining the speed gained from the jump until it could settle on the track properly. This lead to the lap checkpoints being skipped due to the car hopping over them, meaning the lap did not count when the player crossed the finish line. As well as this, all players tried to skip parts of the track by driving on the offroad, thinking that they could use this an an exploit due to the lack of barriers around the track. While only the former is a bug, we will have to take measures to prevent both of these things from happening again.