The good

The graphics where not great, but people liked them. I’m so glad that I went with the simplistic line style. It saved me time doing graphics and I did not have to load any resources. I only spend like 30 minutes on the car graphics and the line drawn font.

Box2D did a nice job, while I could have tweaked the controls better, the engine acted fine on large load. My biggest fear was that the large amount of ‘objects’ that I created would slow the engine to it’s knees. Special thanks to Erin Catto (creator of Box2D) I think I scored points just because I used this engine.

Time, I never thought I could finish a game in 24 hours (I noticed to late that LD13 was that weekend, and had other plans made already) but with cutting some corners I did finish something. I’m surely back next time. (with food photo!)

The Bad

I should have taken the time to add some sound, and test everything. I broke mission 5 just before my final compile, and I forgot to add the frame limiter (if you run the game at 120Hz the game runs twice as fast as on 60Hz) a few simple tests could have catched this.

Controls, I never got the high speed stearing right. Not sure how to fix it, might need to change the stearing angle depending on the speed. Or ‘fade’ the stearing from zero to max-stearing when you hold the button, instead of giving max-stearing instantly.

The map generator has some issues. The AI paths generated are fine 95% of the time. But sometimes they where just plain wrong. As I spend most time on the map generator I still had to make a game after that.

The AI was stupid, too stupid. They piled up so easy, there is some “teleport yourself away when stuck and not seen” code just to keep everything moving, but that didn’t prevent jams, it just solved them when you where away. I made up the game name later to make up for it a bit.

Also the lack of chooses for the player made the replay value low. After you got to mission 5 there is not much left to do. And if that one worked you got 1 more mission and just random old missions after that. You don’t upgrade anything, surroundings never change, and you never get to shoot anyone. I got the feeling that I could do a lot more in 48 hours next time.

It’s a game where you cruise the digital roads to deliver data packets. Or as fry said it “YAY, I’m a delivery boy!”, there are 6 different missions. But the game should get boring after some time… if only I didn’t need sleep.

You can download it here source code and windows binaries included. Should compile for Linux (and maybe Mac) without much fuss, but didn’t include makefiles for that.

http://daid.mine.nu/pub/LD13_DigitalRoadJam.zip

Feel free to leave comments.  I know the AI has a tendency to make roadblocks. I hope to get a few more hours into it later. But now I have other obligations…

Also got some stupid car AI working, which has a tendency to pile up as soon as multiple cars get stuck on the same road. Not much I can do about that now, that will take to much time. Guess I’ll just recover stuck cars when they are offscreen long enough.

So, I got a city simulator now… guess I need to add some game logic now.

Here is a screenshot of a random generated city, with cars. White dots are cars, blue lines are paths, green stuff are walls (box2d users will know the color )

Pulled in some libraries and with some handy dandy box2d work I got cars with reasonable realistic stearing working. So now I just need roads, AI, and all other game logic… oh and sounds effects. Did I mention not losing hope yet? Scrap that…

Well, here a screenshot for your enjoyment: It’s not much, but it’s something. Road generation is up next…