Major update

Downtown Drift Update v.1.2

Downtown Drift - OG Pack · published 27 Dec 2019, 22:30 UTC

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In this Update I am addressing most of the issues that have drawn my attention since the past update.

Including Downtown Drift in the Jingle Jam 2019 (Humble Bundle) obviously drew a lot of attention to the game. First off, I am very grateful for being able to help out such a great project. To be honest I did not think that I would be able to participate, therefore I am even more happy about the opportunity. That being said, up until that point Downtown Drift was and still is now in a very raw and unpolished form. In addition to that I made the mistake of pushing a game changing update the day Downtown Drift was featured on the Jingle Jam, so there was no time to actually test things prior; some reasonable negative feedback followed. Lesson learned, good thing I was able to get a decent amount of feedback.

Now for this Update I reworked the game rules once more. It seemed like the changes I made last time where a bit too harsh for new players, something I could have figured before... but well. Anyways, from now on you no longer lose the game when you crash into something, instead you lose when you run out of health. Your health does not regenerate, its limited. Each time you crash you lose health, the damage you take is in accordance to your speed and how exactly you crashed. Driving straight into a wall will deal more damage than bumping the side of your car. An important note however: the damage you take is tied to your multiplier! That means once you stack up enough drifts you will take significantly more damage. That way the game gets more difficult the better you get.

Another important change is the new traffic lights system. From now on there is no more poles at the intersections, the cause for probably most crashes. This should make it easier to drift around corners and less frustrating for new players. There are two lights at each intersection now and the color of the lights actually matter too. The way it works is that the light tells you whether there is a police car in the cross street, so the left light for the street going left and the right light for the street going right. If the light signals red it means that there is a police car, while a green signal means no police car. This signal works for the following two intersections on that street, if there is police after that the signal will still be green. This should help to make a more informed decision whether to turn at the intersection or not.

Some small change is the addition of a quick restart button. This should help to offer a quick way to reset once your run has been ruined. Also slow motion has been removed. I might add it back sometime in the future, but at least right now it did not serve any particular purpose, was pretty random and was causing crashes.

Here are all the changes for this Update: