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[STEVIE G]

Details here ...

http://www.charliesgames.com/microsprint.html

Thanks to Charlie K for setting this up.  All feedback very welcome.

Cheers
Stevie

[Qqwy]

Just tried it out for a few minutes. Feedback:

Bug:
-Right-clicking on the 'Car Setup' screen crashes the application with an 'Memory Access Violation Error'. Very strange...


Cons:
-I don't like how the application keeps trapping my mouse even when paused.
-It would be nice to have some ways to influence the racing of the other players.(i.e., block them in some way, or push them off the track.)

Pros:
-I absolutely love the art.
-I love the way the tracks are set up.
-Did I mention that I think the art is absolutely gorgeous?
-The track is very clear, the usage of lighter-color track for higher ground really works well.
-Oh, and the art is beautiful.

[STEVIE G]

Thanks for trying it Qqwy.

I'll look into the bugs. If you play for a decent period of time, you'll learn where and when on each track you can overtake and influence the other cars. The general rule is that the car travelling slowest moves out of the collision more so use it to your advantage. Cars with less fuel are also faster. For example, carry more speed into tight corners and bounce off the AI to crash them or get a wee boost.  It depends on your line also, risk and reward, avoid overtaking on the outside as it's likely to end in tears. 

Glad you like the art - spent alot of work refining this.  I had a few comments that it wasn't correctly lit.  There is some subtle lighting but increasing the color the higher the land just works as you say.

[volando]

I liked it a lot.

- Maybe a speedometer would be helpful?
- for me it feels still a bit unresponsible. Maybe when decelerating would be more noticeable.
- yeah, less automatic. More responsiveness. That would make it better for me I guess.

- Love it already.

[STEVIE G]

@ volando.  I'm not going to add speedometer's as the plan was to keep information simple and avoid any kind of gui overlay during the race.  You get used to it, if you listen to the engine noise you can hear it dropping gears which gives you a good idea of what speed you're doing.

[STEVIE G]

New version of demo which fixes the GUI bugs.  Includes option in preferences to toggle widescreen scaling or rotation (rotation default) + option to toggle tunnel tags (to see there your car is when in a tunnel).

http://www.charliesgames.com/microSprint/MicroSprint_Demo.zip

[Poya]

This looks like it's a lot of fun...BUT!

The game seems to be running in slow motion on my computer. Everything seems really slow...not low frame rate, but just slow. The menus take a few seconds to go from one to next. At first I thought that's how they work and was going to suggest speeding them up. But then I noticed the game itself is running painfully slow.

I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that my laptop isn't plugged in... to lazy to check right now but I will. Is there anything else I can try to do to help you debug this?

A couple of other side notes about the UI:
- There seems to be too many menus that you have to click through to get to the actual game. Maybe it's also compounded by the slowness of the transitions, but I think there is room for merging some of the menus.
- The video options don't take effect until the game is restarted. At the very least the player should be notified of that.

[STEVIE G]

@ Poya,  everything is 3d so all I can suggest is that your graphics card isn't up to the job.  My card is ancient and it runs at 60fps no problem. I have had no other reports of slow speeds.  In the options/preferences menu there are some options which you could disable - TV screens, Particles and Shadow detail.  The default shadow map is 2048x2048 so that could be the issue.

The menu's were designed with accesibilty in mind. I know what you mean as I could lump players / difficulty and race time together easily.  I'll leave it for now to find out what others think.

As for the video option - there is a tooltip at the foot of the screen which says "please quit and restart to active this change". 

[Eigen]

Oh, wow! That was great. I haven't played a single button racing game before but this is surprisingly fun!

It would be the bees knees on a touch screen device. Have you thought about iOS and/or Android support?

I was really enjoying it and I only took a break to write this comment. I'm back to racing now, see ya!

[STEVIE G]

I have a question regarding unlockables.

At the moment in the full game, there are 9 tournaments, each of 4 races of 5 minutes.  You can play at easy, medium or hard. If you get a gold in the tourney, you unlock 2 tracks at that difficulty.  If you finish the tourney in the top 3 you unlock the next tourney for that difficulty.  If you get gold in all tourney's you unlock the expert difficulty and the ability to race each track in reverse.  Only unlocked tracks can be played in the other game modes.  The first 2 tracks being unlocked automatically.

I'm wondering if it would be better to do it differently, for example, each track is a new challenge and the difficulty starts easy and gets progressively harder.  You would then unlock the next track if you come in the top 3.  If you get all golds in the first 10 tracks you'd unlock expert difficulty and all gold in all 20 tracks would unlock 'race in reverse'.

Which would you prefer and any suggestions for alternatives?

[Poya]

STEVIE: I have a newer laptop with switchable graphics: An intel HD 3000 onboard graphics chip, and an ATI Radeon 6770M. I tried forcing the game to run with each one, and for some reason I'm getting a frame rate between 10 and 15 with both. I even tried getting the latest drivers.

Not sure what's going on because at least the Radeon is fairly powerful.

Anyway it's something to look out for...it may be a wider problem on certain hardware configurations. I'm happy to help with anything else you need for debugging.

As a side note: I'm sure you've taken this into consideration but at the moment the game is frame-rate dependent it seems. Specifically the speed of the cars could be scaled by the frame rate to mitigate that.

[harkme]

I love the smoothness of the game, both in the graphical style and animation; however, the single-button gameplay doesn't captivate me. As a child, I did have one of those toys where you race cars on a rail track and that did not hold my attention for long either, so take that as you will.

[LiquidAsh]

Neat idea, and I agree with the comments above about liking the look.
Maybe I just haven't played it enough, but I did find it hard to learn how fast I could go.  When you're steering, you can kind of compensate for different entry speeds.  This one I only noticed crash/no-crash binary feedback.  If you don't want to fill the screen with speedometers, I think I've seen one game that gives you color coded signals for speed up, slow down, or just right.  This kind of feedback makes it much easier to learn how fast turns should be approached.  They can also easily be turned off, when desired.  Nice work!

[STEVIE G]

@ LiquidAsh, that is a very good idea for padwans - thank you.  It would be trivial to add a signal above your car to aid speed and which can be toggled on/off in the preferences. How about a simple quad ( Amber = OK, Red = SlowDown, Green = SpeedUp ) ?

[STEVIE G]

New Version up and this will be the last demo unless bugs found.  Additions include:

* Animated water and boats (best seen on the new BASIN track)

* Animated crowds

* Crowd noises when cars go past stadiums (option to turn down volume in preferences)

* New track - BASIN.



* Speed Assist (activated in preferences. gives you a rough idea of when you need to slow down or speed up - for beginners)

* Easy & Normal difficulty made slightly harder.

Extract this in the same place as the existing file the keep config and any records.

http://www.charliesgames.com/microSprint/MicroSprint_Demo.zip

Again, feedback is much appreciated.

Cheers
Stevie

[LiquidAsh]

( Amber = OK, Red = SlowDown, Green = SpeedUp ) ?

You might want to test this out(?).  Amber could be easily confused for slow down (but less than red), and green could be confused for you're doing well.  Maybe some shapes would help, like a green speed up arrow, a red slow down arrow, and maybe a white check mark for doing well (or maybe nothing when they are doing well).  Or maybe you could draw hints as a picture of a finger pressing a button or hovering above it, to indicate more directly how the player should proceed.  Lots of options...  I look forward to seeing what ends up working best for you.   

[STEVIE G]

I actually just settled on green and red.  Green is speed up and red is slow down.  It can easily be changed if better suggestions come along.  Working out what speed you need to be doing for certain bends IS the challenge though.