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... Read on
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... Read on
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... Read on
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... Read on
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... Read on
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... Read on
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... Read on
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... Read on
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... Read on
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... Read on
It's been a difficult month and I'm really struggling to think of any tasks I've completed on Oversteer Racing. I've been away which dramatically reduced the amount of time I could spend on the game and I've also had some other tasks that have demanded my attention. One of the issues is that the web host I use for this site (and a number of others I run) has been bought out by GoDaddy. For... Read on
Unfortunately it's been a really busy month for a variety of reasons. I've found it very difficult to find regular blocks of time to work on Oversteer Racing and so progress has been very slow. When I have been able to work on the game I've been looking at the end of the race and producing the race summary. I have code to track the race finishers and retirements. The main issue is dealing with... Read on
February has been another busy month because I've needed to work on my fantasy F1 competition and haven't been able to spend much time on Oversteer Racing. In the time I have managed to find I've been working on the end of the race. On the face of it this might seem a pretty simple task, show the positions of the cars and add up championship points, but it's actually a lot more tricky than... Read on
It's always the same this time of year as I need to spend time on some other projects/tasks. For example, I need to get boring stuff done like tax returns and company accounts etc but I also need to work on my fantasy F1 competition. Given that the F1 season starts in March I need to make sure the competition launches at the beginning of March at the latest. As a result I tend to... Read on
I thought it might be helpful to list out some of the tasks that I've completed this year as a way of reflecting on how the game has developed. There have been a lot of little changes but the main pieces of work have been:- Race order - keeping track of the order of the cars. This is a pretty fundamental thing for a racing gameBug fixing - I've uncovered and fixed quite a lot... Read on
It's been a relatively quiet month in terms of Oversteer Racing. I've managed to do a few things but not as much as I'd hoped and, due to Christmas etc, I expect next month to be less productive than November. Going defensive One thing I did look at this month was getting the rival cars to start following a defensive line. I've already added slipstreaming/tows to the cars but I also want the rival cars... Read on
It's been another busy month and once again I've been focussing my efforts on obstacle avoidance... it's been some time now since I've looked at anything else! However, I'm starting to make progress and, although there are still a few collisions, the AI behaviour is getting to the point where some accidents are avoided and the cars are more challenging to race against. The key to the improvement was some time spent tweaking the values... Read on
Recently I've been working on AI behaviour for the rival cars. The main focus has been convincing the non-player cars to avoid other cars rather than slamming into the back of them. As Oversteer Racing has a more realistic damage model than some top-down racers collisions tend to be more serious than in other games. One downside of the non-player cars following a series of potential routes around the track means that they have no... Read on
Wow, dev blog 24.... that must mean I've been blogging about Oversteer Racing for two years... ouch. I'd have hoped to have more to show by this point but the game is something that I can only work on in my spare time and that's an unpredictable quantity. Also, the game is a labour of love, something I want to do but also something I don't want to feel like a chore. Although the game... Read on
So this month has been a bit interesting as I have found some time to work on Oversteer Racing, not as much as I'd have liked, but a bit. Although I've found some time to work on Oversteer Racing I don't have a lot to show for it. I've spent a fair bit of time refactoring some code to make it more useful. Specifically I've taken the code that I use to determine how long... Read on
I have to be honest, it's been a really bad month for spending any time on Oversteer Racing. I had a huge piece of work (for another project) to finish at the end of May and that left me exhausted and the last thing I wanted to do was spend even more time coding. I've been surprised how much working at a consistently high pace for an extended period of time has taken out of... Read on
As suggested last month, it's been another fairly quiet month in terms of work on Oversteer Racing. Part of the problem of being a 5-9 developer, or more often a 10pm to 12am developer, is that it's very easy for other commitments to get in the way of the small window of time you have to work on a project. Also, even when you do have a bit of free time, your day job can... Read on
It's been a pretty poor month to be honest. I've had so many other things taking my attention away from Oversteer Racing that it's been very difficult to complete any tasks. All I've managed to do this month is: Fixed a bug that meant the dust particles kept playing after the car had stopped moving Fixed a bug that meant the lap counter may occasionally miscount the number of laps completed Fixed several bugs in... Read on
It's been a really busy month and I've had to spend quite a lot of time on one of my other projects, my fantasy F1 competition. It's always the same this time of year because of the start of the F1 season and the hard deadline that the start of the season represents. The game needs to launch a couple of weeks before the first race in order to give people the time to sign... Read on
It's been an interesting month. I've not made much progress on new features but once I started adding AI cars into the game it uncovered a few issues.... so I've been focusing on fixing those. 1, 2, 3 ... er As I'm now able to add AI cars to the game I thought I'd add some code to show the current race order. Unfortunately that's where things went awry... The main issue was that the... Read on
It's been a very busy January and there's always a bunch of "admin" stuff to do. So a lot of my time has been spent doing my personal tax return, company accounts and company tax return etc. Talking about that in my latest dev blog is not going to be a rivetting read so I've decided to focus on my plans for the coming year. Get the game into players' hands OK, so this may... Read on
At the end of 2017 I thought it would be a good opportunity to take stock and review what I've achieved with Oversteer Racing over the last twelve months. Progress Pit stops If you've been following along with my dev blogs then you'll know that I began the year by working on pit stops. This included the UI allowing the player to refuel the car, change tyres and fix damage and also animating the pit... Read on
Mucky Creature is a company run by one person and sometimes it's difficult to find the time to work on these projects. Unfortunately November has been one of those times. Lots of other things crop up that demand your attention and, when you do find a bit of time, you're a bit too frazzled to be able to focus on code. So, it' been pretty slow going this month... That said, the work I have... Read on
For this dev blog I've created a video showing the progress I've been making with the game. The transcript for the video follows. Transcript Welcome to the second dev blog for Oversteer Racing. I had hoped to produce these video dev blogs more frequently but it's been a busy year so this is my second... only nine months since the first. The focus of this video is to show you some of the progress I've... Read on
This month I've been tackling two fairly difficult tasks... Where are we? It's a simple question and one that's fundamental to a racing game. You can't have a racing game unless you can work out which cars are in which position and split times between those cars. It seems like an easy problem to solve but in circuit racing there are lots of things to consider (such as lapped cars). In other games they rely... Read on
This month has been slightly better than the previous two and I've been able to put a bit more time in on Oversteer Racing. Teaching rivals how to drive A lot of this month teaching the rival cars how to drive. I've spent quite a lot of time planning how to implement the code allowing rival cars to race around the track. In the end I went with a waypoint system but allowing rival cars... Read on
Last month was another difficult month as I've been very busy and not able to put in as much time on Oversteer Racing as I'd have liked. That said I did manage to do some work on the user interface and also to work on improving the code that tracks performance (lap times etc) during the race. The opposition I did manage to do a bit of work on "the opposition" and some research on... Read on
This month has been pretty difficult. I've really struggled to find time to work on the game. That's largely due to lots of other things needing my attention and reducing the amount of free time I have. When I do find a bit of free time I've generally been pretty tired so I've not been as productive as I'd hoped. It's all just part of the ups and downs of creating things in your spare... Read on
This month has been interesting as I've been mainly thinking about some of the user interface issues and work associated with allowing users to customise the game. How big will the game be? As an indie dev, and the sole person working on the game, the size of the game is an important factor as it defines the amount of work I want/need to do and this also affects when the game will be finished.... Read on
This month has been another really busy month and I've not been able to spend as much time on Oversteer Racing as I'd have liked. One of the biggest (if not the biggest) issues when you're working on your own on a project is, if you're busy or tired and you can't face working on that project in your spare time then nothing gets done. The lack of progress can then get quite frustrating. Anyway,... Read on
It's been a really busy month as I've been working on my other racing project - the online fantasy motor racing competition that I've been running for the last 17 years. Oversteer Racing has had to take a bit of a back seat while I launched the competition for this year. However, I have been working on a few tasks... There and back again I have been trying out the animation tool in Unity to... Read on
I've been fairly busy with other things this month so haven't made as much progress as I'd like. However, I have continued making progress on the pit stops. I've now introduced the concept of tyre sets and cars have a limited number of sets. This means that, if making many pit stops, there isn't a never ending supply of tyres for the car. The plan is, if all the sets have been used, the car... Read on
After the somewhat slow progress I made over Christmas I've managed to get a few things done over the last month. This has been a big encouragement as some parts of the game are taking shape now. Stop.... Go! This month I managed to do a fair bit of work on pit stops and these are now functioning as I'd like, albeit without a beautiful user interface at this stage. As the car enters the... Read on
One of the main issues with developing a game in your spare time is that finding that time can be difficult. There are many competing concerns for your time and, during the year, you find yourself with more or less time than you expected... almost always less. Over the holiday period I had hoped to be able to get my head down a bit and dedicate some time to writing code on Oversteer Racing but... Read on
This dev blog is quite aptly named as I had planned to work on pit stops this month. However, what's actually happened is that I've had to spend time working on other things and not been able to put much time in on Oversteer Racing, so it really has been stop/start. That said, I've outlined my (little) progress below and talked about my plans anyway. Pit stops I want strategy and pit stops to be... Read on
In this dev blog I'll be focussing on damage to the car and how that affects your race. The damage dilemma I think it's important that your actions in the game can affect the car. For example, if you have a big accident and hit a wall then this needs to be reflected in the game. The dilemma is how much impact that should have on your race (and, potentially, your fun). In essence, should... Read on
Welcome to the first dev blog for Oversteer Racing. I've been working on the game for a while but thought it was about time I started talking more regularly about what I've been up to. My plan is to publish a new dev blog during the last week of the month throughout the rest of the game's development (inc. post-launch). Game overview Oversteer Racing is a top down racer for mobiles and tablets. It is... Read on
