Seems like you got your nomenclatures and expectations all over the place.
Firstly, what do you mean by "make my own tile or spritesheets and call from those, scale or vector them and then after placing, be able to further edit or change without editing the tilesheet constantly"?

The tiles and tilesheets are something the artist will have to provide. There are tools to help with that, but overall this is something that should be done before putting it "into" the engine.
Scaling is one of the most basic functions of any tool that deals with models or images, but vectoring something is really advanced and you can't expect to transform a bitmap into a vector and have the exactly same image. And even so, the only tools capable of doing that are vector softwares, so in the end is just better to start from vector. You have to decide early on if you want to use bitmaps or vectors, because whatever you decide, you'll be creating the art as it from the start, you can't be changing from one to the other. This is a decision that likely you change the art style of the game as well.
Finally, if later on you decide to change something on the tiles and tilesheets, you'll have to go back to the art tool and edit. After you place it in a scene on the engine, it's there, you can't really edit it from the place it is placed.

"I'd also like to be able to FREELY PAINT on the map AFTER placing tiles, "
If i understood you correctly there's no tool like that. You want an "art/level design" software all bundled together and that's just non existent. At least not that i know of. In another words there's usually a very thick line that divides the game tools and the art tools, and no tool that i know of does both like that.

Nice, much more feasible now. Could finish on the third try.
Take a look at your UI, playing on windowed 4:3 the screen cuts left and right UI elements

i only know who tig notaro is thanks to tigsource

Seriously, I've never heard of that name until now.

lol, me too.

Wow, that's a pretty looking game. Looking forward to the next updates.
Question: how did you achieve the reflections on the ponds of water?

Top notch character design. i'll keep an eye on this

The creatures remind me of the alines from Heart of Darkness. Gave me a nostalgic feel

[@marcgfx:]

@marcgfx: The game is ideally played on gamepad. You can play on keyboard with a little practice though. Your turning issue is probably one of wheels spinning up more than the others, or you are get over/under steer. This can happen if you accelerate constantly and is a reason playing with analogue controls is best so you can make small corrections.

@TitoOliveira: Are you playing on Windows? It turns out the games is completely borked on Windows. Your wheels disappear and the cars go crazy. I'm trying to fix it at the mo', but have no idea why it's doing it.

Yeah, Windows 10.

Yeah, i couldnt play as well. As soon as the race begins the cars crash into each other and my car at some point faces the wall and i cannot do anything.

Main character jumping animation.

Why does the character's face disappear suddently?

You could allow the next player to find the loot of a previous attempt.

Basically, this.  It would probably be easiest.
Aside from that, you could have a Rogue Legacy type of thing where the child of the slain character inherits traits from their father/mother.

A couple of ideas from a game I was working on that I might not end up using, but are similar to these:
1) Child character receives an heirloom--one of the items that the parent character used, but heirlooms have a small stat-increase or whatever.
2) In a similar vein to Rogue Legacy, child inherits stats based on what the parent's class was (e.g., parent was a mage, so child was around books all the time and gets +1 intelligence).

:: shrug ::

Devil's designer here:
How would you prevent players from killin themselves on purpose to keep upgrading the item?

Pretty cool, had a blast while playing. It's goddamn hard too, i couldn't finish the desert part, the times i performed the better i stood inches from the last checkpoint on desert. I believe the difficulty of the demo level could be toned down a little, it requires perfection to finish. After a few tries i didn't even bother to continue racing when i crashed or run out of the road.
Liked the music and the sound design overall, the song changes a bit around the time the game transitions from the forest to the desert, which is cool. Also liked the game over, when everything gets quiet and there's only the motor sound, felt like when reaching home at night after a long travel on the road. I just think it could have some beeps when the countdown is reaching zero, the first couple of times i got out of time i was kinda surprised.


 

Hello,

I tried your game and I have to say the way you described the idea it sounded like fun. Reminded me of Road Rash. Here is my feedback in no particular order:

1- Controls are really slow. The car feels that it is steering slowly and the turn speed is just way too slow for my test. I have to turn far too early to get a turn right, otherwise I lose the turn.

2- The powerups idea is good but the powers aren't quite impressive. The jump for example; I did choose it and didn't find any locations where I had to use it, except to get over some brown long rectangle cube that I jumped over it and then fell off the terrain. Perhaps adding variety and giving some of these as the basics while the better versions being the ones you choose/upgrade might be a good idea. Specially if this is action oriented. I believe you'd need to give the player the basics and they'd strive to get the extras.

3- The action is missing. There are no enemies (I understand this is a prototype but I am just adding it in) so I was disappointed to try the "action" part. Also the powerups don't relate to action (related to previous point).

4- The track is kind of weird. Not always is the path clear and I sometimes have to make guesses. Not to mention that when I get off track, I can still go on with the race (specially if I have 2 or more keys pressed on the keyboard). The walls are climbable at some points and I was able to scale mountains once I reached a certain speed with the car.

5- I loved how I was able to scale a wall or an elevated road while accelerating. It has a good feel, albeit the car speed was slow overall and slugish that it killed the feeling.

6- There is no apparent goal. Yes, I should finish but nothing to direct me to the next checkpoint or points out the correct way. If my car flipped around in a long straight area, I feel lost and not sure where to go.

All in all, the game was generally good and I have to say it is a good starting point specially for a week's time. You have a good concept and I believe you might have something good going on. You just need to polish the mechanics you have there to maximize its fun potential.

Hope that helps.

Thanks for the input.
Most of what you said was on my mind also. The controls are a little stiff, there's no enemies so it's still missing the action. But i wanted to show off the mods for the prototype, because without them i might have been able to add enemies, but it would just be a normal racing game then.
But the fact that you lost your direction is something i didn't expect. I guess i got used to the track since i had to race it so many times to place the obstacles and to basicaly design it.

I enjoyed playing it for a couple of minutes. Reminds me of Mashed, so I can see it's potential as a local multiplayer game. You may take inspiration from it's rules which make races short and fun.

Controls feel slow and not too exiting, though, and the course has too many long straights where there's nothing going on. I'm not sure about the mods mechanic, or at least about choosing one at the beginning. You don't really have much to base your decision on. I feel like it would be fun if you could change your mod during the race somehow. Maybe grabbing a box a la Mario Kart?

Hope I've been of some help!

Thanks for the input.
About the mods, it was a thoughtful decision to deviate from the kind of gameplay like Mario, where you gather power ups along the race. This was planned to be more like you upgrade your car and buy mods for it between races. Then the player could base his "loadout" around the track he was going to race. Something like that.

I need a definition for my study. I need to explain what do I mean by "indie games" and how do i qualify the game as "indie". My adviser told me to write my first chapter based on some researchers' articles/books and then choose my own definition that i will use in further research. I was also told to write something about history- how and when did it all started, how were independent games made in 70s, 80s, 90s, and how are they being created now, what changed in technology, marketing etc. Right now i've got about 3 pages about what indie means (and i mentioned that the definition is problematic, of course), but nothing about history.o And I was also told to write something about the typology of indie games? I'm not even sure if there is something like 'typology' in that case...
And thank you all for help, that's very nice of you!

Jordan Mechner, the creator of Prince Of Persia, talks a little here about how it were to develop games back them. Prince of Persia and many other games were created by a single person, or very small teams. In a sense, indies.


Some videogame documentaries also cover that side of things. But i can't recall any to recomend out of the top of my mind.

Yeah I see what you are saying. I'll put together a mockup with a shortened torso and longer arms for the hang frame for comparison

In the mean time I have been nitpicking to death the heads



When working on the rest of the run directions the right/left was bothering me and I figured out it was the head. I can only turn the body so much without losing all detail but the head  can be completely rotated amd I left it the same as the down right/left and this didn't differentiate things enough. So with that said I tried to rotate the head fully but I am stuck. I can't settle on anything for the right and left.

So above is what I have plus some options I have played with. Everything I do makes it look like a robot. Anyway, does anyone have a preference?

Have you tried something like this for the side view?

I have a very special place in my heart for Heart Of Darkness. But everytime i tell someone about it they're all like "yeah, iguess i remember something like that, dunno..."

Yeah it's hard, originaly indie is something made by someone independently. But, just like it happened to music, "indie" became a popular cultural phenomenon. And that is pretty recent stuff, so it will be a hard to find academic reference of that. Maybe on gamasutra you might find someone talking about this, so you can reference it.

I've seen it, it's pretty good! but doesn't quite get to the challenge I'm talking about. Take the mechanic from Mario where the tiles flip, for example. Before you can think of how to introduce the mechanic to the player and subsequently present him with more challenging situations that require more sophisticated strategies, you have to figure out what exactly constitute these challenges and strategies. What layout patterns are too hard/easy, which grid size is too big, too small, too narrow, and what kind of enemies combine well with them, which don't? These things have to be well defined and are then used to create the levels. It's all based on experimentation, and I find that hard.

I guess I'm not talking about "level design" exacly, but an almost invisible step preceding it. You can tell that when someone analyze a game, like the video, they already have the knowledge of what a good level using the mechanic looks like and take that for granted.

Yeah, i get what you mean.
Well, i believe it all comes down to what the player does in the most basic level. In the case of mario everything boils down to jumping and running with him. So i would place a bet that the size of the tiles, the spacing, the timing it rotates, and everything else relating to it is firstly compared to the Mario mechanics.
For instance, rewatching the video, it seems to me that the lenght of mario's jump is th length of the tile, so if he jumps from the middle of a tile directly to another tile, it will land in the middle of it. The time it stays still before rotating is exactly the time it takes to jump, land and run two steps, so the player will always have this window of oportunity of two steps to avoid an error or correct a wrong jump, or something like that. But i'm just speculating and can't really be sure of any of it.
In any case yeah, it is somewhat based on simple experimentation, trial and error, and whatnot. But i believe you can filter down how much, or how far you'll have to trial and error if you have in mind the most basic action the player will be doing the whole game.

This video provides a pretty good insight into your problem. It resembles what Alec suggested as well.

Hello guys.
So, this is a prototype i developed for an online game design course i've attended.
The high concept of the game is inspired by the old cartoon Speed Racer, and old games like Death Rally and Ignition. It's a game about racing against oponents from point A to point B avoiding hazards on the road while trying to throw oponents away.
We had a week to develop the prototype, so what i have here is the basic mechanics of driving the car along the track using mods that enhance the car habilities.
I wanna know how you guys feel about the prototype itself, but also how you feel about the concept of an action racing game with the prototype mechanics as it's base. I'm not sure if i'll keep upgrading this prototype. But if i do, i'll probably try to add a local multiplayer to assess if this would be a cool game to play against friends.

There you go, hope you enjoy (webplayer build):
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4613421/UnityGames/WildRun/WildRun.html