Made in 3 hours, for Trijam #328

Instructions/Controls

W / Up Arrow key - Accelerate

A + D / Left + Right arrow keys - Turn

Left Shift/Space bar - Boost for more power! (Drains health)

Complete a lap by passing through each checkpoint in turn (the currently active checkpoint will be highlighted in yellow) - once all checkpoints are complete, cross the checkered flag to complete a lap!

Your healthbar will be drained either when you use your boost for power, or when you leave the track. You have to decide if the increased speed/shortcut is worth the tradeoff of losing health!

The game currently has 2 modes:

Normal mode - Leaving the track will drain your life slowly

Track only mode - Leaving the track will instantly kill you, so be careful!

Development

I haven't had time or space for GameDev for a long while, so it was nice to be back (albeit, being a little rustier than usual)!

I almost immediately came up with the idea of a racing game where boosting was tied to health. I originally wanted to include sections of track that healed the player, but sadly ran out of time - implementing the track collision was a nightmare in trying to find a performant solution, and while I'm happy with how that system turned out, it swallowed a lot of dev time.

The checkpoints/gates for me were a great way to make the game replayable and introduce an element of competition (I also wanted to include an online leaderboard, but again time wasn't there). Combined with the mechanic of being able to go off the track, but losing health doing so, it turned the whole game into a risk/reward scenario!

Furthermore, I liked the idea of a mode where leaving the track was instant death. In this, the boost becomes less about providing speed and much more about enabling handling; a well-timed boost in the middle of a drift can greatly speed up turns!

Credits

BoxFox - Trijam game template

Kenney (kenney.nl) - 'ship_g' from the Simple Space Pack + assets from the Sci-fi UI pack

Pixabay - Jungle Music

Boxfox - All sfx