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12 September, 2013

Update, Afternoon 4 on my touring car arcade racing game

Today, I've been working on three areas:

 I'd already implemented a basic system where I can drive around the circuit and record the path the computer cars should follow, but now I've added braking and acceleration areas. The computer movement is still not perfect and needs to be improved (especially the turning which is very jerky) but at least for the moment the computer cars don't whizz around the track at full-speed.

If this game succeeds and I manage to finish it (fingers crossed) I want this game to be editable and mod friendly, so I've created an easily editable file with all the car stats and drivers. So, the player will be able to change the characteristics of the drivers such as their names as well as of the car such as the car's speed, acceleration, braking and weight. Also, the Windows/Linux PC version should also allow the user to create and draw new car liveries (any maybe even 3D models for the PC version).

 Finally, I've implemented the system that keeps track of who is in which position, depending on lap-times and checkpoints, although it needs fine-tuning. For anyone who has followed my blog or seen previous posts, they will see that after the initial week, I have often lost motivation for games, when the coding becomes overwhelming, and therefore there are a lot of unfinished games on my hard-drive ( As shown on the basement section of my website).
This time, I think I've started to manage myself better through two tactics; the first, is that I've created a nice colour-coded spreadsheet with all the task I have to do, and organized them by 4 columns:

1. Priority: how urgent is it that I create this part of the game now.
2. Time: How long will it take me.
3. Difficulty: How difficult will it be to do
4. Importance: How important is it to the final game.

 This has allowed me to sort tasks out, with the most important at the top (such as the game engine) and less important ones at the bottom (such as little graphical touches) 

Also, I continue to watch races from the BTCC each night, which are very exciting and make me want to get back into the code. Below are some screenshots showing the different teams (currently just colour coded) as well as a temporary table of race positions in the second.

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