BGMC 14 | Fun Kart Racer by Thatimst3r

A Mariokart style racer but without Mario. Created within a week for the BGMC 14 contest with an n64 theme. I had lots of fun making this game (when it worked), and hope it will bring a smile to your face :).

The objective is simple, try and win the race! The player and the AI both have 3 abilities, which can be collected around the map:
-boost
-rockets
-shield

The entire game was made with textures smaller than 64x64 (including the animated textures).

here is a play-through of one round:

There are still some issues with audio restarting as well as some issues with the ranking system when it is switching points or the player and the AI get too seperated.

You can get the .blend here (flipper animations will only work in 2.70a or below).
or you can get the game.exe here

Enjoy

-Thatimst3r

Attachments


This was pretty awesome!

The track was pretty narrow, and I experienced a few bugs here and there, but I liked it!
It took about a minute to load the track though, and once it did, if froze after the dirt-loop around.
Set it to Multitexture, and after that, it worked just fine.

There are still some issues with audio restarting as well as some issues with the ranking system when it is switching points or the player and the AI get too seperated.

Didn’t notice any cutting out/restarting, but the green panda guy started driving in circlesnear the mountain,
and somehow came in second place. Speaking of which, the game is pretty hard! Did only try it once, that’s probably why…

Pretty cool! I love the character designs.

If you’re having trouble with the sounds it’s probably because of Blender’s awful sound system.

Sound actuators play a sound, but if there is another sound playing it plays too. once too many sounds are playing then one of them gets discarded. Another problem is that if the object is ended the sound gets ended too.

I suppose it’d be possible to make a sound manager, where requests are sent to a central object which executes those sounds, unless doing so would remove a critical looped sound (like the background music). I think SolarLune said he made something like this, if you’re interested, maybe ask him about it.

As a sort of work around I usually use Empty objects as a sound emitter. When an object has to play a sound it drops an empty with a sound actuator set to play mode, not loop. The sound will play all the way through even if the emitting object dies. You can also set them up to drop a sound object at set times rather than a single object once on a loop.

So a robot has a walking sound that lasts for 1.5 seconds. Every 150 tics he drops a new sound emitter. This means his walking sound will never be turned off, or even if it is, it’s only for 1.5 seconds, and then a new sound emitting object will be added.

Thanks for the feedback!

Now that I think about it the track is fairly narrow compared to the normal mario-kart games, maybe next time if I made the characters a bit smaller this might have worked better.
The freezing issue is probably due to the graphics device, but I’m not sure I can do anything about that.
I think the panda driving in circles would be the delay on the track to actuator, which I turned down but obviously not enough.
The ranking system is a little broken and probably needs some more work. I think some of the glitches are due to the character physics but also the method of tracking around the map. Maybe next time I will use steering and a navigation mesh.

Glad you like the game :), hopefully there will be more entries!

Interesting, I might experiment with this. I agree with the sound system being terrible, even after not having used it much. I reckon they went with quantity over quality when creating this actuator, as I can’t imagine using half of the functions.

Hopefully in the Game Engine reboot for 2.8 they will attend to this. For the meantime I will use empties as mentioned in future projects.

Thanks for the tip!

very very good keep up

Very cool graphic style and nice gameplay, as well as the AI which seems to work great.
Nice little game.
Only the music starts pissing me off after 30 seconds :smiley:

Thanks :D, glad you enjoyed it!

Thanks!
I didn’t think the music was that bad but maybe it was the bad quality combined with the restarting (that really bugged me). Maybe if I get a bit more into music composition I can create my own music instead of having to use other peoples.

No don´t get me wrong, it wasn´t bad, it fit the game nicely.
But it kinda was annoying, which in some way was good, so I think you nailed the feel of the game very well with the music.

What i see from the video this looks great. Very cute character design! Unfortunately it always crashes for me after the trafficlight turns green. So im sad not beeing able to play and so not beeing able to vote for this game.

Oh that’s is not good :no:, although after the light turns green there is a spike in logic, as everything is “unlocked”, or initiates.
Have you tried the .blend, and switched it to multitextured? that seemed to work for randompickle97.

Thanks for the feedback though!

I won by doing u-turns into the finish line… but other than that I could not win. but It was fun overall, nice game.

That was really cool. I agree with the track being just a touch too narrow but after playing a few times I got a feel for it. The powerups actually came in handy too. The race I won was because of a few missiles. I like the effect they have, it was just enough to help me take the lead. Everything looked solid to me, didn’t notice any glitches and played it 5 or 6 times. I think the only thing I didn’t like was the abrupt orientation change of the vehicle when you encounter sharp angles on the road, especially the side of the dirt road. Awesome overall, good luck in the contest!

Yeah, I think going the right direction should have probably been implemented along with a minimap but I didn’t exactly have enough time. I found after playing it a couple times, you notice that the AI slow down around corners, and that is when you overtake them.

Thanks for the feedback!

Awesome glad you liked it, maybe next time I will increase the amount on the slow parent (for the camera), as going over bridges was a bit lurch-y as well.

Thanks!