12th in Overall and 5th in Innovation. Not to bad for a bugged game I guess. It sucks bigtime that I bugged mission 5, which means nobody got to play the “speed” mission.
The good
The graphics where not great, but people liked them. I’m so glad that I went with the simplistic line style. It saved me time doing graphics and I did not have to load any resources. I only spend like 30 minutes on the car graphics and the line drawn font.
Box2D did a nice job, while I could have tweaked the controls better, the engine acted fine on large load. My biggest fear was that the large amount of ‘objects’ that I created would slow the engine to it’s knees. Special thanks to Erin Catto (creator of Box2D) I think I scored points just because I used this engine.
Time, I never thought I could finish a game in 24 hours (I noticed to late that LD13 was that weekend, and had other plans made already) but with cutting some corners I did finish something. I’m surely back next time. (with food photo!)
The Bad
I should have taken the time to add some sound, and test everything. I broke mission 5 just before my final compile, and I forgot to add the frame limiter (if you run the game at 120Hz the game runs twice as fast as on 60Hz) a few simple tests could have catched this.
Controls, I never got the high speed stearing right. Not sure how to fix it, might need to change the stearing angle depending on the speed. Or ‘fade’ the stearing from zero to max-stearing when you hold the button, instead of giving max-stearing instantly.
The map generator has some issues. The AI paths generated are fine 95% of the time. But sometimes they where just plain wrong. As I spend most time on the map generator I still had to make a game after that.
The AI was stupid, too stupid. They piled up so easy, there is some “teleport yourself away when stuck and not seen” code just to keep everything moving, but that didn’t prevent jams, it just solved them when you where away. I made up the game name later to make up for it a bit.
Also the lack of chooses for the player made the replay value low. After you got to mission 5 there is not much left to do. And if that one worked you got 1 more mission and just random old missions after that. You don’t upgrade anything, surroundings never change, and you never get to shoot anyone. I got the feeling that I could do a lot more in 48 hours next time.