I've mostly been posting progress on the Playdate Squad discord server lately, but really a lot of it is just backend stuff and things that i can't show for spoiler reasons anyway. Still, I wanted to throw out another message here just to reassure forum people that the project is still moving - and in fact, it feels like it's getting close to being finished now!
Campaign Mode:
I've got a full set of campaign tracks (24 races in the 3 settings shown in earlier posts here), though I still might revise or replace a couple of them after doing some more playtesting with other folks. These tracks are all very short, around 30 seconds (because that's my general preference in full-Trackmania maps), which may sound like "only 12 minutes of gameplay" but each of them has four replays to compete against (Bronze, Silver, Gold, Author) and I think most players won't get the gold times on their first playthrough. For a lot of players, I expect them to get "mostly bronzes and a few silvers" on their first campaign-completion, and then (hopefully) they'll want to go back and get tougher medals, to unlock some bonus rewards (which I'll get into later in this post).
Companion App:
This is mostly working now, and just needs a few extra features (stuff like "rename/delete tracks on the device"). The website can load a list of tracks from your device, and shows a thumbnail for each one - these thumbnails are generated by the game, instead of the web service, which is a little odd but it lets me be confident that they'll always look correct between the two apps (since they get generated with the exact same routine that usually draws the level-select previews in the game's menus). Currently you can only share a track via a Huge URL (where the URL contains all of the track data, meaning nothing has to be stored on a server), but I'd like to add an option to upload/download plain files too, particularly for tracks that are too large for URL-sharing (since URLs are limited to about 2KB for browser-support reasons).
Cars:
Along with less-exciting options menu stuff, the game has a car-select screen, and I started working on an old-timey car (based on old versions of the game, where the original car model accidentally looked like one of these from the back). Car choice is cosmetic-only, so there's no strategy involved in picking a model. Another user on the discord offered to make a car model, so if he doesn't find the game's mesh restrictions too irritating, I'll include that one too - or, if the weird rules turn out to be too much of a nuisance, I'll just make a third one myself.
Unlockables
Here's the current plan for stuff you can unlock by playing the Campaign mode (any mention of "get this type of medal" really means "get this medal, or a tougher medal"):
- Get a Bronze medal: unlock the next track
- Get a Bronze medal in all 24 tracks: unlock the track editor
- Get 8, 16, or 24 Silver medals: unlock goofy joke-cars (in addition to the default three)
- Get 8, 16, or 24 Gold medals: unlock little themed rendering demos (more info below)
- Get Gold medals in all 24 tracks: unlock author-ghosts in all tracks
- Get Author medals: reveal pieces of a secret QR code
The "themed rendering demos" have been a fun little diversion lately. Since these are unlockable rewards, I haven't been showing the actual scenes publicly, and instead I'm just showing this doofy example scene featuring Suzanne Blender to show progress on the renderer. This is a completely different rendering setup than the main game, taking heavy advantage of a static camera but letting the player control the sun with the crank (you can also adjust the fog density, but that's not shown in this clip).
![2024-08-22_23-18-27-ezgif.com-video-to-gif-converter](https://devforum-cdn.play.date/original/2X/3/38ef0d29f665cf2640241ab3ce471d18f7b7d2cf.gif)
If you've heard of Deferred Shading, this is basically "Very-Deferred Shading" - the gbuffer is generated offline, and then only the skybox and lighting (lambert, blinn-phong, rim-light) are rendererd in realtime. You can see some ghosting artifacts on the sun as it moves quickly...this is a result of the renderer only updating part of the screen during each frame - this problem is more pronounced on the device (the ghost-trails take longer to fade away), but it still feels fast enough for this type of usage.
It's hard to guess how much time is left on the project, but my to-do list is finally getting shorter instead of longer, so I feel like the end is in sight! Excited to finally submit this thing for Catalog consideration some time in the not-so-distant future.