Thanks for your many months of patience! We've made a lot of changes to the core programming of the game. We really thought about the game loop of entering, finishing, and exiting a race and decided to amplify the experience with the following changes:
Bear Biscuit coins are earned depending on your placement in a race:
- 50 Bear Biscuits for 1st Place
- 20 Bear Biscuits for 2nd Place
- 10 Bear Biscuits for 3rd Place
Those earnings are reflected in the Results Page with an animated counter AND a drop of physical Bear Biscuit Coins onto the Podium, occasionally knocking the cars off! We even have an End of Race Announcer voiced by the talented Dela, who can be found here:
And yes, Bear Biscuits found off-track get included with your Podium Placement earnings once you arrive on the Main Menu.
A lot of thought has been put into the life cycle of vehicles between spawning into a race and either overloading from boost or falling off a cliff. So we upgraded all the shader materials and programmed in some new features. The vehicles build up dings and dents with every car and object impact. And when the vehicles drive through mud they build up a thick layer of mud on the body, tires and interior.
You'll also get to see our new Mud Spray effect in action. It looks really dark on Guttural Crack but that's because we did so much post processing with the camera exposure, so expect that to be fixed next week.
Speaking of fixes, the foliage is a lot sharper because we stopped streaming in textures and billboards for foliage. There's a slight performance cost, but way less pop-in and the foliage feels fuller. We'll actually have to trim them down soon! Also the foliage has baked lighting now, which helps it sit in the environments a lot better.
Cactus doesn't have the ability to destroy vehicles right now since we rebuilt foliage from scratch, so take advantage of your invincibility while you can.
There's been a small under the hood change to respawning where we don't call game objects directly, which is good for performance. A lot of variables and game objects have been serialized for performance gains as well. Sadly we had to ditch our Object Culling solution due to instability with Unity Editor, so we lost 10-15% of our framerate switching back to the built in Unity culling system. But we still have a lot of optimizing to do for vehicles, props and environment assets. Just need another month for that milestone.
The Boost Audio was fixed so that it no longer stutters when the player starts boosting from say the middle of the boost bar. The cooldown audio plays when the boost button is released. And the code behind the scenes is just cleaner for boost in general, with separate audio sources for each clip.
We brought back Depth of Field, which is especially great when playing in 1st Person Mode (R1 Button). And if you haven't raced in 1st person, you haven't lived.
Our new vehicle the Floor Hawk isn't playable yet but it will occasionally harass you on the track. Richard did an amazing job making this vehicle, and it will ultimately be the final vehicle of the game.
Thanks for reading this long ass post and we hope you enjoy this update!