Admittedly, GRITS Racing is a small fish in a big pond... so... time to find out what it is like to be a small fish in a much smaller pond. Thus, I took the plunge to run and release a build for Linux. It was a bit of trouble -- and perhaps a waste of time -- but not that bad as most tools were ready to go for Linux. Also, this paves the way for building for the Atari VCS when it arrives. More on the Linux build further down.

0.3.1 updates:

• Wwise plugin updated from 2018.1.6 to 2018.1.10 to fix a bug in the Linux build.

Windows and Mac will likely not see a build of version 0.3.1 since I see nothing else in the plugin update that would affect the game much on those platforms.

In other news (for my November update) I hope to start work on a new track soon even though my new job is sucking a lot out of me with their insanely-complex proprietary tools they build their simulator with. We'll see. I also see I need to move the game towards "full controller support" sooner than previously prioritized so I can jump on the new "Remote Play on TV" tag in Steam. To do this, I need to expand the options menu to include settings currently handled by Unity's launcher.

Steam tagged GRITS Racing for their new "Remote Play Together" feature but I haven't tested it yet. But, for those asking for online multiplayer support, maybe this will work well enough for now.

Regarding the Linux build, here's the excerpt from our readme:

A Linux build has just been added to the OS offering. Future Linux support is not guaranteed. Currently, 64-bit Ubuntu 18.04 with Nvidia drivers is the only supported configuration, and is not yet considered a high priority. At time of release, the Linux build has only been tested on Linux Mint 19.2 64-bit (Ubuntu 18.04 base). This was on a pretty outdated mid-2010 Mac Mini with a 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo and a GeForce 320M and performance was good with the "Faster (2x AA)" game option (8x AA was too slow).

OpenGL 3.2 or later is required. This would roughly include Nvidia since 2006 (GeForce 8), AMD since 2006 (Radeon HD 2000), and Intel since 2012 (HD 4000/IvyBridge). Good luck with drivers other than Nvidia.

The SLD2 library must be installed if not already. Hint:


The Unity Launcher may require other libraries such as libcanberra-gtk-?. If having trouble, launch from the command line to see any messages.

Version 0.3.0 doesn't add much that will be noticeable over the last 0.2.x version -- it is more of a wrap to all the 0.2.x edits. That said, there was still a ton of hard work behind this update. Most of that was on those barely-noticeable shadows. The shadow controllers were rebuilt, and then rebuilt again, until I found the right setup for optimal performance with shadows on both static and dynamic objects as well as optimal track editing. Thus, just about every object was updated (and updated again) even if not significantly so.

New features:

• All objects (of any significant height) now have a shadow (of one sort or another). This adds a tiiiiiny bit more depth to the track. Sometimes I think it works well... and sometimes I think it is silly looking and not worth the effort. We'll see where it goes from here.

Fixes:

• The larger/wider wheels now show the smoke and dust they generate (only the standard wheels were doing this correctly before). The wheel shadow for the larger wheels was also on the wrong layer. Not sure why these things weren't fixed much sooner. I suspect I had noticed it during smoke/dust development, and then forgotten in some rush to publish. But, I really can't remember. Regardless, I can't believe it took me this long to notice and fix the smoke/dust problem.
  
• Many, many, other minor tweaks and sprite updates not worth listing.

Updates:

• The drag chute has finally received the attention to detail that pretty much everything else has. This isn't final polish yet, but at least it is more than the quick test feature that it used to be. There is new art and the chute inflates with motion. The collider on the chute has finally been enabled after resolving most scenarios where the chute might get stuck on the wrong side of the track barriers. This can still happen through no direct fault of the driver, but the precise scenario is extremely rare and, thus, dubbed part of the chaos of the game (don't get rear-ended while diagonally backed into a wall). Anyhow, the chute can now get tangled on some objects such as other cars -- but this feature has been made to also be fairly forgiving and should untangle fairly easily.

New features:

• New Wacky Wodifier: Greased car seats. This is my new favorite wod. It's for those who think the drivers are a little too glued to their seats considering these jalopies have no seat belts. I'm tempted to make this the only race mode and cancel all the other wods. I won't... I don't think... well, not anytime soon.

Changes:

• Wandle track (the figure-8) has been made a bit easier by moving the barrier tires 2 meters further back from the race line.
  
• Some sprite updates and tweaks.

Some cleanup of things missed in all the work of the last release.

Fixes:

• Pedestrian cursor was being drawn on the wrong layer.

Other minor sprite tweaks.

This update brings some significant features and updates and -- if you haven't tried GRITS Racing in a while -- now would be a good time to try it again.


0.2.9 new features:

• Drivers can now fall out of the car during hard collisions... BOOM!
  
• AI agents can also fall out. If their car is still workable they run to it. If not, they run away until they hit a wall and jump over (really, they just disappear for now).
  
• Tesla Shields remain on even when in your car (but it takes a close hit to the cockpit to trigger it). This protects you from t-bones... but mostly helps to unstick the huggy types.
  
• New car art and palette tweaking to improve color identification and car direction

0.2.10 new features:

• "Jousting lances" Wacky Wodifier added
  
• Wacky Wodifier selection now appears before the first track in addition to between tracks. (Some players may not like this change but I need to try it out. Let me know.)

Most important to me with this update is that the base game is finally approaching the level of silliness I had first imagined for the game. This was brought about by adding a feature that allows the driver to fall out of the car in hard collisions (and partly by leaving the Tesla Shield on while driving). This is a feature that has been discussed for a long time but, honestly, I didn't give it enough weight before because I was hesitant to spend time on the technical challenge of it. I felt other things were more important early on and that losing wheels would reach the level of silliness I was hoping for with this game. I was wrong. The loose wheels bring as much frustration as they do fun. More fun chaos was needed... and I wasn't terribly sure what that should be.

The sequence of events that led me here is this: I wanted Wodifier selection to start before the first track and not just between tracks (because many don't play the game long enough to discover this whole other level to the game). To do that, I needed one more Wod to have 8 Wods for an 8-track race. When looking at my todo list of Wods, I decided to go for the jousting lances next for whatever reason (it was a gut feel). The original alpha plan for the lances was to maybe just trigger the Wheel-eject button when hitting a driver -- thus, forcing the driver out of the car soon after that. But, while dwelling on this for a few days, I was continually bugged by the thought that literally unseating the driver instead sounds much more fun than knocking the wheels off. So, after thinking through all the work that needed to be done to make this happen, I decided to go for it. And, the first step for that was -- guess what? -- actually placing the driver object in the car object (instead of object replacement like I was cheating before) and making the driver unseatable with a breakable joint. Hence, a driver that can also fall out during a hard collision. It was a beautiful thing when first testing this, and I was sold. D'uh! I already had a feature of drivers on foot.... So why not just exploit that code more? Should have been more obvious to me.

I'm also extremely happy with the resulting code from the refactoring. While some things are indeed more complicated with the new features, much of the code is now cleaner because some things are easier or more straight forward now that the driver object is always on screen for the duration of the race (unless you are an AI agent that chose to runaway after destroying your car).

This object-compilation change also triggered the long-awaited art changes to the car. The new car art includes a hood that is slightly wider and is now much more close to what was originally envisioned. A common complaint has been that the cars can get too hard to identify when things get messy. So, even though the cars are tiny and will remain tiny, my hope was to improve color-identification of cars by 20% or so with more car-paint pixels. I think I just might have accomplished that. Yes, this is not a huge improvement but, hopefully, it will be enough of one. Also, with a much-larger and much-more-realistic cockpit size, hopefully the front end of the car is also now more apparent. The darker colors have also been lightened a bit (while still staying true to their international racing color origins). The rest of the palette has also been tweaked to improve color saturation where shaded colors were desaturated for no good reason. There are more sprite art tweaks coming, so stay tuned (not to mention the art overhaul at some unknown point).

After all that, jousting lances could finally be added (not that it went down in that exact order -- there was a lot of parallel development). The lances brought about plenty of their own game-design challenges. They aren't as fun as they sound... and probably never will be. Thus, it was tempting a few times to stop work on them. The cars are simply too high speed and twitchy, and the world is too open, for formal jousting to happen well (and, thus, I call the Wod "Jousting lances" and not "Jousting"). I kept working it, however, until I found a design that makes me fairly happy with them. Again, a lot of refactoring throughout the game to make them work as I eventually worked it out through much testing. The end result is not terribly easy to use for unseating other drivers... but still fairly enjoyable with how they interact in the physics environment. Expect maybe only one satisfying lance hit per race. I have cheated the width of the glove on the end of the lance as wide as I feel I can get away with (about 50cm) for the style of this game... but I'm not terribly sure I won't tweak it wider later. Note that hitting the driver with the glove is typically required to unseat the driver with the lance. Hitting with the shaft of the lance typically won't do it -- nor sliding back on the shaft to hit with the glove -- the hit has to originate with the glove. Also, I'm pretty confident the first request many will make for future lance work is to make them steerable. Hmm... I'm thinking on how best to do this and am open to suggestions on how exactly they should steer... of the three or so options I currently see.

Say hello to the new Wandle figure-8 track! (Based on the recently-demolished Wimbledon Stadium track in England -- and the same size as near as I could measure from satellite photos.) I placed it at track 3 in the lineup and moved 3 to 5. I hope ya'll like it as much as I do. This track took quite a bit longer than hoped due to the additional features built for it and/or built for other tracks because of it. About 200 hours. It has simpler art than tracks before it but, hopefully, it is sufficient until we can come back and redo all the art.


Also, included here, for the ultra curious, is a photo of some of the physics rigging (the green lines) that goes on behind the scenes in these tracks. As you can see, it's no small amount of work to rig up a track for all the features the game offers.

This update skips v0.2.7 (the new track) and went to v0.2.8 due to the new features that came with the new track shebang.

Some of the new features/fixes that add to making a mess:

• Breakable barriers! Regarding barriers that are not critical for keeping the player on screen, or out of certain areas, many of these are now either no longer nailed down or are nailed down with breakable nails. Not all tracks can make use of this feature but the one's that do should now be just a tiny bit more interesting to crash around on.
  
• The lighter-weight track objects not nailed down (such as hay bales) now show their damage about as quick as everything else. This was done by adding mass into the equation for damage on dynamic objects.
  
• Tires used as barriers now show damage. Currently, they "lose their paint" and get darker with damage.
  
• Barrier tires now come in many more colors thanks to rewriting some stuff to make this both simpler and more flexible. A win-win.

Fixes:

• The drop point for new cars is now adjusted according to width of tires attached (another happy side effect of refactoring stuff for this figure-8 track). There should be no more pit wall crowding/entanglements when getting a new car with a wide tire setup. Eventually, I hope to animate the new car event with car drawers and a crane.

In other news, still job hunting so time on this game is hard to guess and manage. The next track will probably be a mini Suzuka but we'll see. The current plan is to work on the remaining tracks in the same order as the order of colors/flags on the punch-in screen. Thus, it could be a while before I finish minifying Monaco (the choice of Tootsie the Purple Privateer). Before the next track, however, I need to build more Wodifiers and work out some other things holding things up.

Finally, in case anyone is keeping track, this game update serves as the August news post. I don't plan to write a separate news post in months where I expect to publish an update.

As always... Thanks for playing!... and party on!!!

This is more of a hotfix than an upgrade. This implements a small visual change in the menus. The rest of what follows in this post is just a tl;dr peek behind the scenes.

I had made a previous claim that the next update would be the next track. Well, that is still true, depending on point of view over hotfixes. Regarding that track, the background art is now complete (if not simplistic for now). The track will also need some new code because it needs to place trucks in a new way (and maybe the cars and drivers too). So, a day for coding a new track feature, a couple more long and hard days for rigging, and it should be done... that is, whenever I can find time for those long days.

Back to the hotfix. While working on the next track, I became distracted by something I noticed in the notes on the sales returns. 1/4 of the returns were claiming that the game had no support for keyboard control. ??? Okay, I get it, the placeholder text I had for the buttons have been very misleading with keyboard players trying to do things with the ABXY keys... instead of what the ABXY gamepad buttons are mapped to on the keyboard for players 1 and 2. But, still, "no" keyboard support? Did they not try the arrow keys and Enter and Escape, which are always on for menu navigation regardless of how the game controls are mapped (WASD+MKJI, etc)?

Okay, I also get that many people will abuse Steam's return policy and just make up reasons for a return just to get a game for free. Some may even briefly look around in the game for some stupid excuse to feel more "legit" about their activities. Regardless, my placeholder text was long overdue for replacement. Ideally, I would make the menu responsive to the inputs it sees. But, I've got many higher priorities than that right now. Heck, I'm not even at Steam's "Full Controller Support" yet (I need to write a replacement to Unity's launch window to earn that sales gimmick). Who buys a car sim expecting great keyboard control anyhow?

Anyways... I took a small amount of time to draw some placeholder button icons to replace the placeholder button text. This doesn't directly help the keyboard players who can't bear to look around for one of the many places I've posted the default keyboard commands... or to use the Controller Setup feature in the game menus to define their own keyboard commands (and who also can't bear to ask anything before making a return). The hope is, however, that these icons will help inspire keyboard players to look a little deeper for the key mappings to the buttons. Don't know, but it's the best I can do right now for this console-first game. I do care about keyboard control. I test with it regularly and put quite a bit of thought into it. The keys have the same gravity as the buttons and d-pad they map to.

Regarding the button art, I wanted something fairly universal to help players find the right button regardless of what kind of controller they are using (including the keyboard). That's how I ended up with these silly paw-print-looking icons. But, hey, it's a silly game that is nowhere near final menu art yet. We'll see if it works for players or not.

Another common keyboard complaint is that keyboard control is too hard. Well, frankly, so is gamepad control for many players -- and the keyboard is not much different (but, yes, somewhat more awkward to manipulate than a gamepad).

I've put maybe 1,000 hours into the physics behind these cars and their handling. That probably sounds like too much time in an indie game. That's why I often say this game has more realistic physics than perhaps a 2D party game should have. Most of that was probably spent on testing and tweaking to find a car that feels really good to both me and to novices.

There were some helpful ideas on the net for setting up the physics on a 2D car... but none of them were correct on all points. Thus, everything here was built from the ground up, and checked and rechecked. Some things stumped me for quite a while. Many discoveries were made only through long testing sessions when things just didn't "feel" right. Once, I spent a week or two just looking for where I was going wrong somewhere in the transmission and power-train code. It felt like something was off by about 5x. I could have just fudged the correction... but that's not me. When I did find the mistake, I calculated things were actually off by 4.8. Trust your gut. Fudging, no matter how creative, invariable leads to something someone will notice and not like. (Well, I guess everything on the planet invariably leads to something someone will not like... but that doesn't make fudging any more acceptable. I'm not fudge-free either though. Some things just don't fit in the budget or the machine specs.)

So, yeah, the cars can be hard to control at first but, if they were easier, they wouldn't be nearly as interesting. Hopefully, I'm not the only one that sees it that way. The cars are tuned to where most players should get the hang of them in the first 60 seconds. After a minute or two, most players should feel like they are mostly in control even though they may not feel "good" at it yet. I achieved this while maintaining interesting collisions and such through a secret-sauce of driving aids. More aid than I, personally, prefer (for example, it's harder to get into a donut than it should be), but it is what seems to be well balanced for most casual players. I hope you like the effort.

Matt Jernigan

There are no major developments to report this month. I spent most of June looking for a publisher for GRITS Racing to help push development along faster. Most indie publishers don't bother responding... and, well, that is not surprising these days. Of the ones that did, I got one nibble, but nothing else to report on that front. It is hard to promote a game that is both an old genre and not visually interesting yet.

The next track, a British-style figure-8 track, got a small start in that I completed the engineering drawing for it (photo attached). Curiously, this track did not need to be minified. I also made a rough sketch of mini-Suzuka (seen in the background), another figure-8 track (due to flattening the bridge). Plans have also been written down for how to minify Monaco. Monaco is looking like it will be the craziest of the 12 mini-realism tracks (with a suicide lane planned)​... but not as crazy as what the fantasy tracks might bring.

Anyhow, due to taking time to chase publishers, I still need to finish up a small contract and then look for what most people call a real job (like, maybe, being a greeter at Walmart) before I can return to working on GRITS Racing.

Thanks again for taking time to follow development on our game.

Matt Jernigan

I wish to be as transparent as possible and to update the fans of GRITS Racing on the status of the game at least once a month during slow development periods.

The good news is that discounted early-access sales continue to trickle in. Fans also continue to trickle in on the Steam community and on wishlisting the game. The bad news is, as mentioned in the news post for the last version update, my savings has finally run dry and I must pause to look for other work. Thus, between working on a small contract, looking for work, and maintaining my patches for old Sierra games, I haven't had much time left for GRITS Racing these last few weeks. I usually don't give the game patches priority over GRITS Racing -- so don't worry about my priorities there -- many of the fixes that I could add to that collection have been on hold since I started full-time work on GRITS Racing in August 2017 and will remain on hold.

Once I get my finances above water again, work on GRITS Racing will resume to whatever degree I can manage. We're at only version 0.2.x and there is still a ton of work planned before we get to version 1.0 (not to mention features already on the version 2.0 wish list, as well as features for spinoff games). The British figure-8 track is still planned for the next update. After that, I will probably alternate between more mini Grand Prix tracks (Italy, Japan, France, GB, Belgium, Netherlands, and one unknown, perhaps Monaco) and more Wacky Wodifiers. Then, hard to say of the many things left after that.

If you haven't tried the updates yet that came in April and May, give the latest version a try. The A.I. cars, banking (not visible in the art yet), smoke and dust add quite a bit to the game over versions 0.1.x. The game is struggling to find its audience, partly, I figure, because I haven't discovered how to break through the noise yet. Also, party games on PCs aren't much of a seller, regardless. Then again, maybe it's best the game hasn't gotten any coverage from influencers yet because there is still so much more to do before it's in a good position to make a good first impression with most players.

I'm also starting to look at the Xbox One in addition to the originally-targeted Switch and secondary Atari VCS. Maybe GRITS Racing should be added to this Xbox One List of games with 8 player local support (a list which is surely out of date now).

Thank you to all of our fans! 👋 You make the absurd risk of building this equally-absurd game worth it.

Matt Jernigan