AGS Kart

[Peder 🚀]

AGS characters and approved racers with a standardised kart would be awesome all we need is a moderator for them.

And a default template would be cool .

[selmiak]

now I want to draw some tracks

So would it be possible to have another dimension in the 3d effects, like a tunnel and a way over the tunnel for an 8-track?
Also ice on the road for slippery driving?

[Technocrat]

now I want to draw some tracks

So would it be possible to have another dimension in the 3d effects, like a tunnel and a way over the tunnel for an 8-track?
Also ice on the road for slippery driving?

I've been dragging the courses from Mario Kart into it for an experiment - haven't been able to find a full-size image for the tracks, but the ones that are 1024x1024 representations are working alright so far.

If we're going to standardise a character size, let's make them bigger than Mr Elephant from Wacky Wheels. It means I can give more details and definition to the Nancymobile.

[Kweepa]

The player's cart in Mario Kart is about 36x32 on screen.
The Wacky Wheels cart is similar.
Any bigger and the gameplay will likely suffer. Plus, you lose the "template" from those games, and it makes the bar for adding a character higher as the size increases. Not everyone has days to devote to all the required angles. I suppose we could add a scalar to each character, but you want the sprite to be unscaled for the player cart for best effect.

3d is a whole 'nother level of difficulty for the engine, and I don't think we want to add to the difficulty! We could just have the track cross for added excitement. I was thinking that a separate track image would indicate the progression around the track, so you'd have to enter successive regions to finish a lap.
Ice/oil/bananas are of course possible.
A tunnel is also acheivable, with some polygons, but care would be needed when rendering and colliding.

[Technocrat]

Well, I'm sure I can make her smaller then. Everyone'll only be staring at the back of her head!

I've been experimenting with a parallaxing moutain-scape in the background - not a great deal of joy yet, I'm wondering if I make its speed of movement at the edges slower than the middle it'd look more realistic perhaps...better do some more research with Mario Kart...

[Eggie]

You guys who are making this happen, you are my heroes.

[Kweepa]

I've been experimenting with a parallaxing moutain-scape in the background - not a great deal of joy yet, I'm wondering if I make its speed of movement at the edges slower than the middle it'd look more realistic perhaps...better do some more research with Mario Kart...

I wouldn't necessarily look to Mario Kart. The Panorama module should do the job. It might even be possible to just plop the module in above Kart. If not, it can be modified pretty easily.

[Icey]

I think if the separate swarm members are going to make their characters or just AGS for the game they should be seen in they respected look from what ever game their from. Their should just be a certain size for every body to go by.

[Snake]

I agree that the smaller the racers, the easier on the gameplay/visibility it'll be.

Also, let's not forget about Blue Cup for a racer.

<-- He agrees

[Hudders]

The blue cup should be the trophy everyone's racing for.

Mario Kart has Star Cup, Mushroom Cup, Flower Cup, etc. AGS Racer has the Blue Cup.

[Technocrat]

The blue cup should be the trophy everyone's racing for.

Mario Kart has Star Cup, Mushroom Cup, Flower Cup, etc. AGS Racer has the Blue Cup.

Blue-Baby-Cup, Blue Cup and Big Blue Cup?

[SinSin]

Its like idea ping pong down here       

I just designed a layout and tested it on the second tester and the track seems too wide its hard to get it right lol

[Hudders]

Blue-Baby-Cup

Now I not only want to see AGS Racer characters, but also baby versions of those AGS Racer characters.

[Snake]

The blue cup should be the trophy everyone's racing for.

Great idea! It's such an obvious thing that I didn't see it!

The Blue Cup: That's another great idea. It aught to be fun coming up with names for all the cups and courses

Here's an idea for items: Like in Mario Kart there will be items for dropping, throwing, homing, protection/shields, speed boosts, etc...(I'm assuming this is the route we're taking). What about having each of these items' graphics be character specific? What I mean by that is all of the specific items you can optain do the same thing for each character, they just look different for each character.
For instance, in Mario Kart there are the bananas that can be dropped/thrown and any character that hits them spins out. But what if, the banana was only for Donkey Kong? So if you chose to race as Yoshi, his drop/throw item was an egg. The egg would do the same thing as a banana. Just an idea Personally, I'd be fine with the items being either way, character specific or all the racers get the same items. And most likely, making an egg drop instead of a banana, because you're Yoshi, may be a pain in the ass to script anyway... I don't know, I can't script for shit

[Icey]

Here's another idea, if it's not too much each character has 3 unlock-able items they can use during the race by unlocking them with enough Big Blue Tokens that you gain after races. you can set one of those items to use during if you get an item box, or you can make the game shuffle at random through the items and pick one. It's sorta like how the item boxes work in mario kart but with set items for each character.

[DoorKnobHandle]

This is very interesting, once again, wish I had the time to contribute more at this point!

Gameplay/-design wise I would heavily suggest to pay attention to how random you make the game. If you do add in a lot of random drops (like those mentioned two posts above by Snake - speed boosts, weapons, shields and such) you also make the game extremely dependent on luck. I for one really dislike this school of design and would favor a more pseudo-competitive, fair way. As an example: the afterburner (speed boost) I wouldn't have it come in the form of drops at all, have it be always useable but your engine overheats when it's used for too long of a time. The engine cools down on a, well, cooldown. This way there's a big element of skill immediately present in the game: good players know when to use their boost (during which parts of the track) and during which (sharp corners and the like) not to use it. And they can use short bursts of afterburner to help them accelerate and get up to speed after a crash or at the start of the race. Compare this to just hoping to get lucky and picking up some speed boost drop item!

This is just one example, I urge you to go deeper into this territory as it will improve the game's (re-) playability and fun factor in an extremely simple way. There can be drops but don't have these appear randomly on the track or out of crashed enemies, have them be planted in the tracks so their locations stay the same. And make sure that, still, what is dropped isn't too powerful!

Sorry for the stream of consciousness kinda writing style, I'm in the middle of doing about ten things at once, hope I made myself clear regarding the direction I'd like this game to take!

[SinSin]

Kinda looks like we need to plan all these different areas.

Weapons
Tracks
Grand prix design  (ie points designation and trophy design)
Racers 

Any Ideas on planning

DKH  the engine idea is a very F1 scenario (I kinda like it but if races are like 5 laps or less then why would the engine overheat? )

Very quick 1st draft   some parts are very wide    but coming along nicely

[DoorKnobHandle]

DKH  the engine idea is a very F1 scenario (I kinda like it but if races are like 5 laps or less then why would the engine overheat? )

I don't think we're exactly going for a very realistic setting here, are we? Shouldn't be a problem to have engines overheating after about 6-8 seconds of using the afterburner!

And yes, what this project needs (apart from more tech demo updates) is a proper game design document I think!

[SinSin]

DKH  the engine idea is a very F1 scenario (I kinda like it but if races are like 5 laps or less then why would the engine overheat? )

And yes, what this project needs (apart from more tech demo updates) is a proper game design document I think!

Agreed...

*part of post removed

[Hudders]

Why do you need to be PM'd? Just come up with a list of jobs that need doing and then people can sign up for them in this thread. That's how SWARMAGS worked.