Well January was a busy month and, as expected, February has also been really busy. I have completed the move of my business bank account, to be honest I'm happy to be leaving my old bank as they were incapable of spelling my name correctly. So, I may not have been working on Oversteer Racing but I do feel like I've achieved something during February... small victories. This time of year I also have to switch my attention to my 'other game'. For longer than I care to remember I've been running a fantasy F1 game and the new season...

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As I mentioned last month I didn't expect to get much done this month and that proved to be correct. January is always busy because I like to finish off a few housekeeping tasks at this time of year. In terms of Mucky Creature it means my own personal tax return and also doing the company accounts. These things don't take that long to do but I always seem to leave them until January rather than just get them done earlier in the year. It's not like I submit them at the last minute but I do still leave it...

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It's been yet another hectic month and I've done very little on Oversteer Racing. Although I've not done much it doesn't mean I haven't been thinking about the game. This time of year is always tricky in terms of finding time to work on the game. There tends to be a lot going on at work and also at home because of Christmas and it's nice to be able to take a break from things every once in a while. Having side projects is great and really interesting but it can mean that you don't get any breaks and there's...

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This month has been pretty busy, as I suspect will be the case for a while now, and so I've not spent as much time on Oversteer Racing as I'd have liked. One of the tasks I've started looking at is the start of the race. Currently the race starts as soon as the level/track loads which is obviously not what will happen in the actual game. I've yet to decide how the race should start. It could have a "fly-by" recap of the grid positions or maybe some sort of overlay on screen. I think it would also be...

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One of the key things I've been focussing on this month is the behaviour of the NPC cars when racing closely with other cars. To be honest they can get a bit fiesty under some circumstances but are a bit too passive in others. Getting the right balance so that going wheel to wheel is fun is tricky. I don't want it to appear that the NPC cars can be easily passed but, similarly, I don't want them to put you into the wall either. I think it's fair for them not to yield places easily and, if they have...

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It's been another hectic month but one of the things I have been focussing on is the reason why non-playing character (NPC) cars stop. There are a number of reasons why an NPC might not finish the race although the commonest reason is that there is a collision between the player and the NPC or between two NPCs. At the moment the code can detect if a car has spun and attempt to recover it back onto the race track. I've now started looking at what happens if the NPC car has crashed out or, for some other reason, cannot...

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I've been away for a lot of this month and, being the only person working on Oversteer Racing, that's meant that work has been slow. Having said that I have done a bit of play testing and I discovered that NPC cars were taking on too much fuel at pit stops. This made the cars heavy once they had pitted and they were then slow. For a while I thought that there was an issue with the code that determined what the correct fuel load would be for the car to get to the end of the race. After some...

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It's been another busy month but I did manage to spend some time fixing a few bugs in Oversteer Racing. One of the things I discovered was that the game settings were not being used in the race. So, if I set the damage setting on then the car damage wasn't affected in race. This was also the case with the other settings that players could change before the race. This was relatively easy to fix once I'd noticed it. Another issue I discovered was that NPC cars would some times crash in the pit lane. These crashes would then...

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It's been a fairly busy month but I have managed to work on Oversteer Racing, so that's a significant step forward from previous months ;-) As it's been a while since I could put a reasonable amount of time in on the game I've been getting back up to speed by fixing a few minor bugs and tying up some loose ends. Most of this work has still been focused on the end of the race and making sure the data is correct. I've made sure that the race summary uses the correct driver and team names (as set by...

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As mentioned last month I had to spend some time moving my website over to a new host this month. As I was moving the site I took the opportunity to try and simplify things a bit. The old site used WordPress and that's great but it requires some effort to maintain (software updates, database backups etc). As I needed to move the website anyway I chose to stop using WordPress and use Jekyll (a static site builder instead). This should pay back in terms of time but offer similar functionality. I have managed to do some work on Oversteer...

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