Alright, so let me tell you about this thing I was working on, I called it ‘racer max’. Sounds pretty cool, eh? I figured, yeah, this is gonna be it. I’ve always wanted to just sit down and really get my hands dirty with a little game project, something from scratch, or near enough.
Getting Started, Full of Hope
So, I kicked things off. The big idea for ‘racer max’ wasn’t to build the next AAA title, nothing like that. Just a simple, fun, top-down 2D racer. The kind of thing you can pick up and play, you know? The main thing was getting the ‘feel’ right. That was my big obsession from the get-go. I wanted that car to respond perfectly, to drift just a little, to feel like you were really wrestling with it on a tiny scale.
I picked up a pretty basic game engine, one I’d tinkered with before but never really dived deep into. First few days were great! Got a square moving around, then shaped it into something vaguely car-like. Added some basic controls. Easy peasy, I thought. Famous last words, right?
Where the ‘Max’ Met the Mess
Then came the actual ‘racing’ bits. Oh boy. Making a track was one thing, just drawing some lines. But getting a car to follow those lines, and then getting other cars to do the same as AI opponents? That’s where I started pulling my hair out. My first AI cars, they were something else. Most of them just had a love affair with the walls. Or they’d spin in circles. It was more like ‘racer chaos’ than ‘racer max’.
And the physics! I must have spent a week, maybe more, just tweaking numbers. Gravity, friction, acceleration, turning speed. It’s a delicate balance. Too twitchy, and it’s unplayable. Too sluggish, and it’s boring. I’d change one tiny variable, test it, change it back, test again. My family probably thought I was nuts, staring at this little pixel car going round and round, muttering to myself.
Here’s a list of things that really had me scratching my head for a while:
- Getting the collision detection to not feel clunky.
- Making the AI cars avoid each other, not just the walls.
- Trying to make the game run smoothly even when there were a few cars on screen. Performance is a beast.
- Figuring out a simple way to do lap counting and race positions. Sounds simple, but when you’re doing it from scratch, it’s a lot of little details.
Those Little Moments of ‘Ugh’ and ‘Aha!’
I remember this one time, I was trying to implement some sort of ‘boost’ feature. You know, hit a button, go super fast for a bit. Well, I messed something up in the code, and instead of boosting, the car would just launch itself off the screen into oblivion. It was frustrating, but also kinda hilarious after the fact.
Then there was the performance. I really wanted that ‘max’ in ‘racer max’ to mean ‘max framerate’. But every little thing I added seemed to slow it down. I spent ages just looking at profiler data, trying to figure out what was eating up all the processing time. Turns out, one of my biggest slowdowns was a really stupid logging function I’d left running. Felt like a right idiot when I found that one.
But then you get those ‘aha!’ moments. Like when I finally got the AI to complete a lap without crashing. It wasn’t perfect, still a bit dumb, but it worked. That felt amazing. Or when I tweaked the car handling just right, and it suddenly felt really satisfying to slide around a corner. Those little wins keep you going, you know?
So, Where’s ‘Racer Max’ Now?
Well, ‘racer max’ isn’t gonna be hitting the app stores anytime soon, let’s be real. It’s still on my hard drive. It’s playable. You can race a few laps against some pretty basic AI. It’s got a couple of simple tracks. But it’s rough. Very rough.
But the thing is, I learned a heck of a lot. About game loops, about simple physics, about how to (and how not to) structure game code. And mostly, I learned about persistence. About banging your head against a problem until something finally clicks. It wasn’t about finishing a perfect product, in the end. It was about the process, the learning. And it was a pretty good way to spend some evenings, just building something, making it move, making it do things. It’s my little creation, warts and all.
Every now and then, I still open it up. Look at the code. Maybe tweak something. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll give it another proper go. But for now, it’s a nice little memory of a project where I tried to reach for ‘max’ and learned a lot along the way.
