This week, we dedicated our efforts to resolving many of the issues that players from our play test build reported to us.

On the UI side of things, we are making sure that we are communicated all aspects of the game so that the players know what is happening as it is happening.

We’ve now included a current speed monitor to tell drivers how fast they are driving, as well as include a percentage of how much their top speed has been reduced if they have been hit by a food item:

On the driver side of things, one thing we noticed was that the player’s kart was configured to be in all wheel drive and that our implemented steer helper was not full. This led to us believing that players were not used to over-steering and power being distributed across all 4 wheels in a kart racing game. To combat the “drifty” feeling players experienced, we are shifting those modalities to be in front wheel drive and configure the traction and steer helper to be at 100% to make sure that the kart grips onto the track in the direction that the player wants to drive in.

Also in addition to the changes from a programmatic perspective, we will also change the sensitivity of the controls. Furthermore, for Xbox controller especially, we will change the controls where the right trigger will control throttle, the left trigger will control brake/reversing, the A button will remain the same for firing, and the left joystick will remain the same for turning left or right.

On the AI driver side of things, we want to make sure that the AI drivers do feel competitive for the difficulty level that we have offered the players. In order to do this and fix the issue we had last week where the AI drivers were continually braking, we have set up a path system where the AI can drive through the tracks on various tracks depending on their needs (cost, items, etc.)

Furthermore, the AI can now shoot items and will definitely be more aggressive coming into the final build!

For instructional purposes, we have added a splash screen before the game starts to inform users about rules specific to our game and how to go about them.

Coming into the weekend, we want to refine all the elements of our game and make sure that it is ready for our final game build!

In the realm of our play-testing, we asked classmates and friends to play our game and provide their input on aspects they feel they need to be changed, and so far, we are receiving a good range of feedback!

Also, earlier this week, we were able to meet with Professor Carbone and watch him play our game live! That gave us a great perspective on how a player who has never played our game before would go about playing our game.

Some of the main points of feedback and criticism we received were the following:

• AI Drivers did not feel competitive
• The controls for the driver were straight forward to use, but felt not super intuitive
• The Money system and instructions of the game were not well understood
• The player driver felt very “drifty” and controls were very sensitive
• Players were getting stuck in unfortunate spaces on the track and could not get out
• There was no pause menu
• The tracks should have music

After reading through the feedback we received as well as meeting with Professor Carbone, our team met and set our goals for the next week to fix the points of constructive criticism.

We definitely are more motivated from the critiques we received and are excited for the updates we will make to our final build!

This week, we had our play test build uploaded for a wide variety of users to download, play, and give us feedback!

At the point of sharing our build, we are able to have players race in a circuit comprised of 4 tracks! Below are the finalized version of our tracks.

Coming into the play-test, we had the following fully implemented:

• Player driving controls for accelerations and braking
• Player shooting mechanics
• Tracks
• Item box logic and money logic
• Player UI to display how much money the user has, the current cost of their kart contents, what item they can shoot, what place they are in, and how many laps they have left.
• Lap system
• Main Menu
• Difficulty Menu

One of the more difficult aspects of our game to develop in preparation for the play test build was our AI drivers. On a foundational level, we are able to have the AI drivers traverse the course, but we did run into errors managing how they accelerated throughout the track and their respective shooting mechanics.

We are looking to fix and improve these issues for our AI in the coming weeks alongside the feedback we receive from users.

This week was a pretty productive week for the team, we made progress in building the foundation for our AI drivers, we have implemented a hud-like UI for the driver to observe when we drive, and one of our developed tracks got a really nice revamp!

On the AI driver side, we are looking into various path finding algorithms and currently have an AI driver able to drive around the track. We will have different paths developed around the track for the AI to choose which path they desire to take during the runtime of a race.

With inspiration from Mario Kart, we have designed a hud view that informs players of what their current item is, what the current cost of the items they have is, and how many coins/dollars they have in their inventory is.

This definitely makes it better for the river to understand what strategy to take when driving!

Lastly, going forward with the grocery store setup, one of our tracks got the total grocery store treatment! We are very excited and proud of this one! Now to fix up the other tracks.

This week we took the time to discuss designs of newer tracks and how we should lay them out. Furthermore, we also discussed where items should be placed and what the the aesthetic of each track should look like. As of today, we have the designs of 3 additional tracks to the oval track and constructed the basic skeleton of them. We then took screenshots of them and marked with red, blue, and green highlights where each of the objects will be. Red is for item boxes, blue is for the starting line, and green is for where the money should be placed.

The transition to home development has been a bit rough for the team, but we have been able to work around the definite difficulties through communication. This week, a recent development in our game was our ability to now shoot from the player cart! After some discussion, we decided that players can receive 1 of 4 items from a mystery item box:

• Apple with a weight of 2
• Chicken with a weight of 4
• Milk jug with a weight of 5
• Water melon with a weight of 6

The logic here is that each driver will have a max weight of 10, with each unit of the weight that they store reducing their top speed by 5. Therefore, the most speed a driver can loose is 50 mph.

To ensure that the object doesn’t fly indefinitely there are two conditions in which the food game object that is shot is destroyed. The first condition is when it collides with another game object. When it collides with another game object, it will return the object it collided with, which will help us figure out and understand how to add the weight to the respective driver it collided with. The second condition is if the food object happens to float for more than 3 seconds. After 3 seconds the object will destroy itself. These two conditions ensure that we aren’t using up unnecessary memory while shooting grocery items to each other!

With this week being Spring break for students, our team had the opportunity to go back home and relax. Unfortunately, with the recent rise of COVID-19 appearing in the country, we were informed of the possibility that UCF’s campus will be closed down. Between being out of town and our development setups more oriented towards our campus life, we need to spend some time next week re-organizing our dynamic and make sure that each of us have a development setup in which we can design our game from homes. This definitely affects our plans for some features that we wanted, and we may have to forego some of the features we found “fun” as the shift to online is in progress.

One of the issues that we’ve been facing for a while was better understanding the humanoid models of the asset. As our AI drivers and our player driver will need to be unique in some respect. With our initial astronaut, we finally figured out how to rotate each of his joints such that he looks like he’s sitting and having a good time. One strange thing we discovered while playing with his joints is that in certain positions, his model will interfere with the shopping cart model he’s residing on top of and will cause the model to flip out. Despite this, we found the perfect position for our astronaut.

In addition to re-orienting our astronaut, Jacob is currently experimenting with different controls to see how he can implement the shooting mechanics of the foods.

We presented our first playable earlier this week, and to our surprise our demo was well received. We did gain feedback from Professor Carbone about some design approaches and advice on where to take things from here. One criticism we plan on fixing as soon as possible is the design of the levels. Professor Carbone informed us that our tracks should be more fitting of a grocery store aesthetic, where objects and items are sized proportionally to the driver. He did seem confused about our giant shopping carts in the middle of our oval track, but it is definitely something we are taking into consideration in the coming weeks. Next week, we should be back on developing more features for the game.

With the first playable presentation coming up, we spent this week preparing an initial demo with a player being able to drive around an oval track.

On the oval track side of things, our level designer, Victor, decorated the track with a lot of the grocery store elements that would give the track a more grocery themed atmosphere!

On the player development side, Jacob designed a basic driver prefab with an astronaut buddy t-posing in the shopping cart! As of right now, a user can drive the cart using WASD or the left joystick of an xbox controller where pushing it forward allows it to accelerate.

Also, for our first playable, we wanted to at least showcase the beginnings of an item box system. As of right now, the player can collide with a box and the box disappears. We plan to implement the logic of this after our first playable.

Lastly, we implemented a very basic UI menu to initialize playing for the user. It is simply comprised of a play button and an exit button at this point in time.

For our first playable we unfortunately did not achieve all the initial promises we set in our original commitments. However, it did allow us to set a bar and better understand our limits and what we can dedicate time developing during the semester.