Major update

Downtown Drift Update v.1.1

Downtown Drift - OG Pack · published 19 Dec 2019, 17:51 UTC

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In this Update I finally got to improve performance and reworked some design flaws I have noticed in the past.

First off and most important: The game rules have changed!
Before it was all about creating a highscore by drifting and police would try to chase you. If you hit anything with your car, your multiplier would reset but you keep your total score. So the game was not over and you could just keep on playing pretty much forever. The only way to actually lose was to get get caught by police if they were in your proximity for too long. The solution could have been to add more police cars or make it harder to get away from police in general, but that is not what the game is about. When I played the game and started to master the drifting I set myself the challenge to play the game without hitting anything at all and as soon as I hit something I would restart and try again until I got a new highscore. After playing like that for a while I noticed the game is definitely harder this way, more frustrating, but way more fun aswell. The rush you get, when your multiplier is super high and the next drift will get you as many points as the first 100 drifts did, is just amazing. And the rush comes from the fact that you can lose all that by making a small mistake, so you have to stay focused the entire time though. So I adapted this challenge I have created for myself to be the actual game. From now on, if you hit anything, let it be a lamppost, a wall, police: The game will be over immediately!

Performance has been a major issue ever since I implemented more detailed buildings. I made a very dumb mistake when it came to actually modelling those details which caused a very heavy load on both the CPU and GPU. So with this Update you should see a better and more stable framerate.

Also I made sure to add automatic Input recognition. That means from on there is no need to go into the Options menu to play with a controller. I do have to add however, that not all the navigation in menus etc. is working well with a controller, so I would fallback to using the mouse there.

Here are all the changes for this Update: