I have been fiddling with the start of my game here. I always loved an old DOS game called Street Rod back in the day and I enjoy rebuilding motorcycles as well so I thought I would mash the two together. If you played that old game, you might recognize the garage.
So far I have mocked out the garage, navigation, buying parts and bikes, and the inventory. Still lots to do. I have done psuedo 3d stuff before so that racing should be fun to implement soon as well.
Got the pseudo-3d up and running for the racing. I need to tweak it quite a bit to make it less pixelated and look a little more smooth. I think also adding more decoration around it will hide things as well.
Here is also my launch card which upon viewing again needs a but more tweaking.
Coming back to this project and I finally got some road side decoration going now on the road now but obviously I cannot just scale my images so I will need to draw scaled images for all of the trees and rocks to make it looks good in the distance. I also did a lot of dithering on the images however it seems like it adds a lot of visual noise so I think I am just going to keep the images plain.
This looks cool! I really like the look of the garage
love the vibe. and i agree that the details on the objects might be too much noise when going quickly. maybe you could add more detail if the player is moving slower. Just a thought.
look fun. do you picture there being a progression? i notice prices on items. will there be cash for winning races i wonder
P-Racer is an obvious thing to compare this to. But I really really like the idea of your game being more something where you customize your ride and have more narrative continuity between races. and the bike customization looks legit, I might learn a thing or two just by playing.
Hi Tim! I also think this looks great. I have a 3D engine I started porting to playdate from other embedded platforms I got it working on, it's been going slow, but I have a suggestion or two for you that might help.
First, if you make your scaling assets with 15 shades of gray (1 for the mask) and no dithering in the image, and use ordered dithering to render the shades to the playdate's screen, it would remove the visual noise as the decorations come closer.
Second, you could then employ mip-mapping to clean up how they look in the distance, that way you should only have to draw the decoration once and use code to scale it down for the distance rendering.
I'm happy to share links or answer questions on either topic. Again, the demo image looks really cool!
The progression will be building, tuning, upgrading you bike to win 1v1 street races. I’m basically following the model of the old game
Thanks for the tips! I will look into these thing however this is not true 3d but pseudo 3d like old racing games so I’m not sure how much I will be able to use.
No problem! I'm happy to help.
Ordered dithering is just a fast way to simulate more colors (or shades in this case) so it's not something specific to 3D in any way so I think that'd be the most helpful to use. Most common example of it in use is how the PS1's hardware renders it's images to convert 24-bit RGB colors to the 16-bit RGB color frame buffer, this would be pretty similar converting 4-bit to 1-bit.
Mip-mapping is a bit more specific to 3D, but the basic idea might still help you out, it's mainly just saving progressively smaller versions of the same image, and in your case you don't have to consider their angle since it's just sprite scaling so you'd swap them based only on distance.
Anyway, I'm excited to see how this turns out either way, looking really cool