Since I launched the first playable demo of Spirit of Eternal Racer, I've been busy with several things. My main headache has been improving the gameplay experience with rivals, in other words, the game's AI. As is often the case, it took longer than expected, and in parallel, I introduced some other cars to take a breather. Aside from that, I've also been creating a menu screen, specifically the game mode selection screen.

Finally, and later than I thought, the time has come to share the first playable demo of Spirit of Eternal Racer.

As I've mentioned before, the final steps to complete this first demo took quite a bit longer than expected. The game's features are the same as they were a month ago, maybe even more, but as I explained, there were things to fix and certain changes to make.

Today I'm going to talk about where I am in the game's development. The summary, to simplify it a lot, is that I'm introducing and testing the AI of the rival cars and, incidentally, the AI that collaborates with me.

In the last few days, development has focused on this aspect, and I have to say that I'm still working on it, but I'm progressing more or less as planned. I'm working on the AI so that rival cars behave intelligently and don't just follow a fixed path, but try to dodge other cars, creating a minimally realistic experience. This behavior also includes rivals following the road and analyzing the track ahead. In addition, this means that the time has come to introduce collision detection. So there are quite a few changes introduced at once and, although they are already present in the game engine, many things need to be modified and adjusted. In the video you can see that the movement is still chaotic, the painting of the cars makes them overlap each other and, in short, there are many things to improve.

In the last few days —maybe a couple of weeks— I’ve been trying out a car with different characteristics. Although it might not seem like it, since up until now I had only posted videos with the same sports car, the game’s physics engine actually allows for cars to behave "realistically" based on their specs (power, weight, transmission, etc.). In fact, I had already modeled a second car some time ago, but it had been "forgotten" while I was polishing other things. Now I’ve brought it back and adapted it to work again with the latest version of the code.

The result seems pretty good, and on top of that, I’ve added a feature that lets each model have its own engine and gear shift sounds.