F-8 Racing Manager (Free Demo) Version 1.0 Released

I am proud to announce the completed 1.0 Release for the demo of F-8 Racing Manager, with the last final components and last minute tweaks to properly fine-tune the balancing of the game making their way in this version, making this first game project for G-9 Games something that has reached its full fruition, which is an important step for me while looking forward.  This stand-alone project was meant to be the best racing manager game on the Free-2-Play market at the moment, which I think I can say I have achieved at least to some levels while acknowledging that the game isn't perfect.  This little demo may or may not see an update of the driving AI in the future, depending on my ability to improve it within the actual constraints this game was born in.  I will be working to make a commercial version of this game with more cars, more tracks, more races and a few more graphics (and of course more tongue-in-cheek humor as well), but at this stage I'm a little worried at how the current state of the game would handle races with 20 cars, which will require an improved driving AI.  The good news is that I have several ideas to explore that I already know will be better than the current AI, plus the added experience of this initial project in which I had to learn everything outside of my previous sporadic core programming experiences in traditional languages, so I am confident in my abilities improve this game in its future incarnations, along with other projects that I would like to tackle as well.

The game is a bit more like a toy than a seriously realistic game at this stage, but I think I manage to make an enjoyable little relaxing game to pass time while giving the cogwheels between our ears something worth contemplating in terms of problem solving despite some of its flaws.  I hope people will have as much fun playing this game as I had while testing it.

GameDev

Release 1.0

Updates from last beta release

- Tidied up the fan stands positioning in all tracks so that they don't overlap on each other as they were in the beginning when they were mainly used to make an hermetic wall.  Their decorative purpose has thus been restored along with their utilitary purpose.  This, in turn, makes the game simply look better, making it more of a legitimate demo rather than a mere working prototype.

- Changed all the Text objects that were present on the "Create new team" and "Car Configuration" screens with much better looking spritefonts, making the screens that much easier to read, and making the texts elements look consistent throughout the game since spritefonts have been added to the HUDs in the "Tracks" screen in the last update.  Speaking of which;

- Changed the spritefont for the HUDs with one more compact and more suited for the task of displaying to-the-thousandth-of-a-second timers, making them just better looking and faster to display than the version implemented in the last update.

- Race tracks have also received a name, making it easier for the player to differentiate the tracks between themselves (even amongst those based on the same design) rather than just having a minimap being displayed.  This also helps reinforcing the "last race/next race" concept of which the concepts of season and career progressions are based upon.  The tracks have been named after the real-life tracks that loosely inspired them, namely Monza, Silverstone, Interlagos, Spa-Francorchamps, Monaco and Montréal.

- Added several introduction screens that gives the player basic instructions as to how the game works. These are displayed whenever a new game is started.  Simply click the "Next" button a few times to get through them all and get to the actual game.  I consider this step to be the last capping stone that makes this game "Release 1.0", in other words, fully complete.

Minor bug fixes and final tweaks and adjustments

- I changed back the Confidence and Aggressiveness default starting levels to 0 as it were prior to me changing it to +5 in the last update.  It seemed like a good idea at first, but a testing session beginning with the very first track created for this game (and which serves as a "measuring stick" to evaluate the relative stability of the driving IA given different parameters) made it so that 7 out of 8 cars didn't make it past the first high-bend curve, consistently through several attempts, which ideally shouldn't happen.  Not for this track in particular in the first race of a career, at the very least.  So on second thought, I think it is preferable that I curb my enthousiasm a little in that refards.  I have kept Concentration to +5 (105%) though, as it doesn't bear any negative impacts to it like these other values and the reason to make it to 5 in the first place still stands.

- I fixed a small bug causing the expense value of car accidents to cost potentially significantly more than the actual value it should normally cost to replace a completely destroyed car.  Just a case of a missing clamp().  Do note that cars do get more expensive to replace when completely destroyed as you upgrade the chassis.

- I also modified slightly the configuration IA I introduced at the last update in regards to the car engine, which wasn't quite producing the desired effects in terms of competitiveness, which is the sole purpose of the configuration IA.  Seems to work better now.

- I also cut the non-random portion of the time a disabled car will remain on the track before being taken away from 1 second to .5 seconds, in order to attempt to lower the rate of car crashes that are the results of crashing into previously disabled cars that just happened to remain on the track for a bit too long, as a cheap short-cut in place of having a better driving AI at the moment

- I reduced the amount of decimals for certain variables to only 1, as these were integers that were divided by 3, thus giving me "infinite" digits like x.333333333infinite or x.666666666infinite; I'm hoping to reduce the floating point calculation charge on the CPU by doing so during the driving phases of the game.  It doesn't seem to make that much of a difference on my old machine, but to older machines maybe?  In all cases, these calculations are just simpler for the CPU to handle, and is a good thing no matter what.

- I modified the penalty distribution scheme for car crashes as a mean to lower their impacts on the pilot's attributes, most notably Concentration, which had a tendancy to get stuck to -15 for all drivers after a few seasons, while the other stats managed to fare well in their fluctuations.  The circumstances that increase Concentration just aren't happening fast enough to compensate the rate at which it was being lowered for it to be any sort of "balance" in this sub-system.  The current system uses a random system that caps the penalty values so that car crashes overall should be less costly in Concentration.

- I also added a bonus of +5 Concentration to most pilots during the end-of-season phase to help counter the problem I just mentioned in the point prior, and which represents the positive side-effect of having a couple of months of vacation.  The top pilots have a different pattern of end-of-season bonuses due to other factors associated with finishing the season in first, second or third place which affects Confidence, Aggressiveness and Concentration.

Given that on the more technical set of tracks, any pilot with a Concentration level of 85% (-15) runs a high chance of not finishing the race (although this phenomenon has been greatly reduced in recent updated), I consider having all 8 pilots set at 85% Concentration is bad, m'kay?  So I'm hoping that these measures will hamper down such drastic circumstances from occurring.