Repost note: /tilt/ is, after an insanely long prototyping period and short demo development (playable newgrounds) on development pause. However, I promise it will be back soon. Love, Brin.

What?

To keep it vague, /tilt/ is supposed to be a top-down racing game thats about controlling a unique space-boat with two movement modes. I'm co-developing it over the current university semester with droqen while being supervised by Martin. We are hoping to create a game that makes the player feel, to again keep it vague, cool.

23.08.2021:

The basic movement system feels okay! I think it's the best rendition of the tilt system I tried prototyping so far. After sketching it out on paper I kind of like the idea of the rotator boosting system. A basic version of that is in the game but right now it feels too finicky and wild. Pressing D rotates you to the right and pushes you forward, pressing A rotates you to the left and moves you forward. Pressing them both moves you straight. Pressing space transfers your current speed into rotating on the spot. Releasing space exchanges your rotation speed in your favour for speed.

24.08.2021:

The wings now have some very basic animations that are based on lerping the angles to make it smoother. Rotator state is now more clearly indicated by the face that wings are flush with the body. Coloring the wrench ala FLYWRENCH is going to be an even better version of this. Right now tapping space very quickly makes you go insanely fast as the speed just compounds and increases exponentially.

25.08.2021:

I tried tweaking the controls a bit more, programmed a very hacky collision system (I don't understand why godot does not have something like on collision enter for kinematic bodies). Anyway, I think the controls feel better but I think they are still confusing. I also made some bad levels. They dont allow you to fully experience the current controls and make it feel even more clunky. Small levels are the comfort zone that I need to escape.

I saw a friend play the game (and his mom) and the space button (the fun button) was not logical to either. I think making it a toggle would make a lot more sense and communicate the idea of it being a wait-to-fire sort of action. What was not logical to either was that they can press both of the buttons at the same time and they both tried playing it in a "rythmic" way which was interesting.

11.09.2021 - Levels and information

Over the last few weeks I showed the project to the university professor that will be supervising it, Martin Pichlmair - who conceptually approved of it - and to a lot of other people on a playtesting event. Since the last log, I spent some time tweaking the control scheme. It also took me quite a bit of time to make a level that actually supports the current movement scheme and is not rude towards the controller. After that I did quite a bit of theoretical work - this game is partly developed in an academic setting and I'm supposed to write a paper about it. The paper will discuss coolness of videogames and one can not write a paper about a subject without researching what that subject even is. Turns out, coolness is weird. There are a lot of papers about coolness in relation to market-research and psychoanalysis and finally, how brands can appear cool (yuck 🤢). Droqen made some levels and analysed how the game works in them. But I feel like the "flow" version of the current control scheme needs reworking.

In general today is a very weird day cause I was out for a long time yesterday so I kind of started doing things at a very late hour and now im writing this at 23:01 and heading into the character controller code right after I post this.

10.10.2021 - A month later

Coming to you after a month, I've been slowly working (around 10-16 hours per week) on the game and yet the graphics of it stay the same. Work has been done on both movement schemes with everyone highly prefering the flow movement scheme.

For the past two weeks I tried making the rotator mode work better, however, whenever I bring it to playtesting, regardless of what I did to it, people do not understand it and it feels random. I like some parts of how it is now. It feels cool to do trick shots. The problem is, noone understands how to do it and even I have to admit that the only place where I can do trick shots is at the start of levels that I played, over, over and over again.

As prompted by Droqen, we will try reworking the rotator one more time, this time giving the player the reins over the rotatoion and letting them choose how much they rotate. If it does not work out then I'm willing to give up on the rotator mode.

Simone, italian roommate with very good music taste, said that the game to him feels about the flow of movmenent and that the drifting nature and the waiting ruins the flow. I partly agree. I think flow, can be achieve only with the (heh) flow movement scheme. But, I would like to see multi purpose movement and how it works out.

Hopefully it ends up being good.