In this Update I am adding some changes to the level design.
In the past there has been a lot of complaints about the brightness in the game, which I try to fix as best as I can. Just increasing the brightness in general was no option cause it would completely destroy the visual style I was going for. So I thought about what Information of the level and the track is important to convey. The corners at intersections and the walls at the end of a street where the main points where I would imagine players getting confused. The first step was to rework the intersections and make sure that all corners you can drift along are actually curved now. That means they follow the natural motion of the player instead of being a sharp edge. This allowed me to add billboards to the areas covering the corners. These advertising billboards help players to navigate around the level better while still preserving the overall aesthetic vision of the game.
Some additional change to the level is the removal of the little alleys that would be covered by a fence. Combined with the low brightness I could understand how they mislead players into thinking they can actually drive in there. Lampposts have been removed as well. While I think they were a well put obstacle to make the track harder to drive in general, I noticed that specifically when trying to dodge a police car near a lamppost it almost always meant that I either crashed into the wall or the police. The problem was that the lamppost often limited the options of dodging a police car on either the left or right side to only being able to dodge on one side. If the police car was now already driving closer to that side of the road to begin with it was way harder to successfully dodge it.
As for the traffic light system: The distance as in how far a police car is being detected has been set to two blocks/intersections now. I initially intended to have it this way, but I accidentally had it only set for one intersection. There was also a bug where the signal stayed red although there is no police car in that street. That issues has been resolved now.
Here are all the changes for this Update:
- reworked fences
- added rounded corner buildings
- reworked intersections
- reworked car interior
- fixed cinematic bars
- fixed score formatting
- fixed traffic light system
- reworked lamps
- adjusted board computer font sizes
Feel free to leave any feedback for this update in the comment section below.
Best,
ThatMadProgrammer