Hello all!

I'm here to introduce a game I've been working part time on for some time now. The game is tentatively titled "Death Race" although it's not the most creative name I know. My goal was to make a very paced, futuristic, gravity defying racer VERY similar to F-Zero and F-Zero GX. In this blog I'll post occasional progress and even some tips on implementation for those who like linear algebra.

So far I've managed to get the gravity and physics working very much like they do in the originals. Rather than staring off by boring you with the list of features and details, here is a demo of my latest track which has all of the latest features which should speak for itself (some of my older videos, are from before some key features were added).

I've loosely modeled this track after Big Blue in F-Zero GX. I've also been making all of the assets for this track in blender myself which I'm not the best at, but I don't think they look half bad for what I need so far. 

You'll notice the health bar in the upper left corner which decreases any time I use boost power, hit a wall or get attacked by another player (demo here. The player's ship lunges at the AI if close enough). I neglected to place a healing area in this track however, but the mechanics of the healing areas in other tracks are almost identical to F-Zero and can be seen here. When the health reaches 0 the player dies in a big loud explosion.

Some of the other features worth pointing out are that walls prevent the racer from falling off (although falling off and returning to the track is possible in other tracks), the yellow boost circles that propel the player forward, and the dynamic enemy AI that works miraculously. There are even tracks that demonstrate racing off the edge and landing on another part of the track (although the driving looks bumpy on this demo track. It has improved since).

Below is a demo of a complete 3 track circuit. This video is almost a year old however so some of the bells and whistles aren't there yet. I actually have a hard time with beating the AI in the second track!

The general flow of the gameplay is pretty much like it is in any racing game. Circuits have many tracks which have many laps. You complete the tracks consecutively and whoever finishes the best overall is the winner of the circuit. However the game doesn't yet do anything like save records or give you a satisfying congratulations screen. As you'll also see in the video below, my racers don't exactly have very creative names either, and my menus are sill pretty bland and boring. These are all things I'm working on, but the core functionality of the game is there, and I'm willing to take creative advice/criticism from anyone who has suggestions!