Week:  23/11/23 - 13/12/23

One important thing we'd like to get off our chests before we get into the juicy bits. We apologise, for not keeping you informed as much as we had hoped for, we planned for one devlog / update post a week, but it has been well over 20 days since our last update and for this we are sorry. 

Overview: This week. nope I mean the past 21 days. We have been fairly productive. Seems, we had forgotten to upload posts. We have changed a lot, which includes obstacle designs, level design, and vehicle design. We have also thrashed through quite a bit of documentation, and presentation and upgraded our old code/programs to something even better and bolder. 

Member Contributions:  

Every programmer this week went through our scripts and added comments to make them easier to understand.

Wreckz Studios - A Programmer: 
During the past 20 days, Thomas has been implementing more of the game audio, making minor or major tweaks here and there, so if it doesn't sound right he's the guy to blame 😂.  On top of this, Thomas has made some minor adjustments to the environment, for starters he created the nice RGB grid below the lanes within the game. Which changes colour during playtime.  Furthermore, Thomas has posted messages in a few Reddit communities, he posted 1 or 2 messages in 8 or 9 ish different Reddit communities to try and get some playtesters.  Thomas had also implemented an FOV changer to simulate high speeds, however, we have recently noticed that this FOV changer only works for desktop builds and not the VR version of the game.  And there is more, so to summarise the next few tasks Thomas had done. He created the tutorial system, and a gear system, fixed a lane swap bug, and finally made a press kit through the Wix site builder. Visit that here

Snow Paw Studios - A Programmer:  
During the past 20 days, Conor had been improving our bike lean to make it smoother, but in the end, we removed the bike lean altogether because our collaborative partner LiminalVR decided it was better to get rid of it as they thought players would experience motion sickness which we do not want so we removed that.  Conor, has also been working on the environment a bit more, below are images of the new-ish environment, you'll be able to see a massive difference from the environment in the last devlog post. Furthermore, Conor has also implemented a nice combo system to add more to the game, at the moment, for max combo it doubles the speed you are travelling. Conor has also implemented a UI score system which is displayed on the bike as well as at the end of the level. He also added a simple glitched block counter and a speed counter so that at the end of the level players can check how many glitched blocks they hit and how many speed tunnels they passed through. Ah yes, a couple more things which Conor has done. He has implemented an indicator to make it more clear what effect hitting each obstacle gives, whether it is a good effect or bad. Finally, Conor has worked on upgrading the TDD and GDD documents, as well as a progression-like bar. 

Wi.Bi Productions - A Programmer: 
During the past 20 days, Liam has been mostly testing to ensure the game is in tip-top shape for playing within the virtual world. He has also optimised the obstacle spawning system to use object pooling, as well as fixed a bug for obstacle spawning, where the spawner would spawn multiple obstacles on the same spawn area. This was fixed by, adding an array used to select the spawner to spawn the object on, which gets shuffled. Liam, also made it so the speed tunnel obstacle doesn't spawn as often as the glitched blocks, this speed tunnel obstacle has been set to spawn roughly 50% of the time, making it more of a reward than expected. Liam also created the artwork for the "Neon Racer" text you see, so the banner, the description titles, and the cover image for the itch.io page as well as the title image for the press kit. Which can be found here.  

Boris  - The Audio Expert: 
During the past 20 days, Boris has worked on improving some audio tracks. Tbh, unsure what else he has done. 

Challenges Encountered: 
No challenge was encountered this week

Next Week's Plans: 
Next week, we plan to have a small break from this project.. then we may resume working on it.