Love shifting gears and having the engine cut out. Also the reverb on the engine sounds in the tunnel. My computer is kind of shit right now so I couldn't really get a good enough framerate to play it properly, so this might not be useful, but if you want to see me try and figure out the game, here's a vod. It'll be gone in a few days. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2717183675?t=0h20m7s
oh man, that framerate is ROUGH haha. I’ll make another pass with optimization, at the very least turning down motion blur might help in the future. Thanks for playing!
I have no competences in driving but always liked racing games so i love the idea to gamify racing skill with a arcade aesthetics, I felt to play with full clutch cause playing your game like an arcade with "bad turning" would probably feel meaningless
at the same time I couldn't earn any medal other than Bronze ones, and I would dare even to consider a "wood medal" to say that at least you complete at least a lap no matter the time.
Also the car would start sliding on the road if I'm stopping on a slope, even with break and handbreak on.
I'm looking forward to future demos.
P.S.: for some reason I couldn't make Paddle shift to work, shift up or down won't change gear, I've played with Linux with Proton and I'm playing on Keyboard.
Hmm, weird. I’ll ask a friend with Linux to give it a try before the next demo.
I will also add gold time overrides. I wanted to set a competitive author time for tracks, but that results in a really hard gold time on early tracks where I want to reward the player with an early gold medal.
Also yes. I will fix my tire slip model in the future. Thanks for playing.
surprisingly in depth gear shifting mechanics. the keyboard controls are kind of weird, is the game designed with controllers in mind? why would you put the pause menu on the X button? lol definitely not my kind of thing but the sim angle could work very well for car enthusiasts
This was my experience with the game: I truned it on, and chose the Paddle setup. Seemed interesting to manually put the gears. I hopped into the tutorial, and it was quite technical! A lot of terminology that I was not very familiar with (at least in english) made it a bit overwhelming to follow the first tutorial. The controls are not complex, but demand a bit of coordination. I had to get used to them. But I was able to complete the 6 stages of that first tutorial. Then I advanced to the second tutorial, and here things got strange. The first tutorial taught me to hold "L1" and then input the gear with the Right stick. Here on this tutorial, the game starts me at 1st gear, If I press "L1", the gear changes to Neutral, and then Reverse, and I could not find a way to get out of Reverse. It was very strange. I thought that might have been some quirk of that tutorial, so I tried stage 01, but I got the same behaviour. So I am really confused about how am I supposed to play this game.
Besides my inability yo play the game, presentation feels very nice. There is a good level of polish to the whole game. You obviously also put a lot of effort in the simulation of driving a car.
I guess my 2 cents here are to (if this is your goal) ease in people like me, a lot slower. Game is very technical, so it's easy to be overwhelmed.
Paddle shifting mode just uses L1 and R1 to switch gears, without any holding L1 and moving RS. You don’t need to do the Manual tutorial if you have that enabled, but I should definitely make it clearer. Thanks for giving it a try!
Ohhh, I see. So what got me confussed is that I selected paddle, but then I did the Tutorial 0, which was specifically for fully mannual.
Maybe a solution here would be to have the tutorials for each mode in different categories, or disable them alltogether depending on which set up you choose.
I'll give the game another try know that I have this knowledge.
Coolest fucking menus. My idiot fingers can’t play this on a keyboard. Love the aesthetic, engine sounds, and attention to detail with the clutch and gearing, so will try again with controller (eventually).
Playing on the keyboard is a bit hard because everything focus on using a gamepad. Couldn’t play the tutorials because the UI is gamepad focused, but decided to play with automatically gear even tho I’m not used to it nor have a driver’s license.
I’m not much into racing games (I do enjoy them, but my favourite one is Halo Reach Custom Race, lmao).
Below are some of my takes about the game, sorted by “importance”:
I feel that you should show at all times the times you need to beat each “level” (the bronze/silver/gold thing). Maybe even show their ghosts at all times.
I do feel this game will get cooler the better I play
It would be cool to be able to import ghosts if you are not planning to have online multiplayer. The ghosts directory only have author/player ghost so I guess it’s hard-coded right now.
I feel the game is pretty good for people who enjoy time-attack modes. Not sure how this will translate to actual gamers, tho.
What made me want to play this was the Speed Racer, Hotwheels style tracks, but I’m still learning and playing the first track.
I feel that a first person camera would be cool, but I’m not sure.
I feel I needed more steer control
I never used the boost.
This is how I mapped the keyboard:
wasd to gas and steer
left ctrl/shit to clutch/break
space to handbrake
numpad numbers to shift gear
Settings:
Disabled to respawn in the 1st gear
Max graphics
Specs:
Linux Fedora 42, 8 GB RAM, i5 4th gen, RX 550 2GB, 1080p. I didnt check the framerate but I’m pretty sure it’s 60 FPS all the time.
will definitely show all times next update, good call
yes
yeah, ghosts are for down the line if this game actually gets traction somewhere. some of the code already supports multiple ghosts
eh, people like playing the trackmania campaigns even solo. maybe audiences are different now but who knows, this does have the advantage too of not being a subscription model
the speedracer/hot wheels tracks are usually harder but I should make some more forgiving ones that still have loops and shit, yes
there’s a first person camera, it’s up on the d-pad. not sure what I bound it to on keyboard but you can check in the keys menu
steer control as in you needed more when not drifting?
you should boost it’s fun
numpad numbers to shift gear is insane though, if that strat worked for you then hell yeah. especially if you don’t drive you’re a madman
The steer control is due to keyboards being digital, 0/1, no in-betweens, so that would need a hacky-fix, I would only try to “fix” this if more players complains about the same thing.
This is why I like Halo Custom Race so much, you can steer “analogically” using your mouse, Euro Truck also do the same. To be honest one of the reasons I started doing gamedev was to make a VR Speed Racer game that you could steer the same way as in Halo. Sorry about this useless comment.
Now that I’m a bit better I’m using boost. I took some driving classes from a friend but I was too scared to pass the 2nd gear, lmao. I liked a lot this keybinding I’m using.
My mistake. I accidentally unbound the cycle camera button in the keyboard controls. It’s in Camera > Cycle Camera in the keybind settings.
There are ways to get around the arrow issue that I haven’t implemented. One potential way is to make the steering input “heavy” so you have to hold a direction for half a second or whatever to pull the input all the way left or right.
Another way that I practiced a lot with Trackmania is just rapidly tapping the arrows. But I think Trackmania physics are balanced around that, whereas Neodrive is not.
Much further down the line, I will probably add other cars that are more forgiving to drive on keyboard.
VR Speed Racer sounds sickening. I played BallisticNG in VR with the cockpit view once and got too nauseated to keep playing.
I like that the tracks are designed so you can see what's ahead of you. It made it possible for me to go around the track even at 4FPS on my oldest xbox known to man.
nice art nice drum & base but thing is, i chose paddle, then I used the keys that were in the keys settings for paddle up / down but it wouldnt go out of neutral????
also ESC should exit options not have to scroll down to done
so i played it in auto and yeah it seems pretty cool
Had fun with this, I'm a big racing game guy and this has a good feel to it. I think the game has a little bit of an identity crisis, to me the driving feels like a pretty casual arcade game but you're trying to do a full gearbox simulation which I don't think aligns. I had way more fun when I turned off the manual mode.
Anyways I uploaded all my gameplay to youtube. I ramble a lot and I'm pretty cringe, but I know seeing video can help understand how players interact with your game. So if it's helpful, cool. If not no need to watch them.
yo thanks so much for the stream and the comments, I have a bunch of stuff to change based on this but I’ll also respond here
selecting the first track in a stage when selecting Tutorial or Stage 1 would be good yes
revmatching an upshift is weird terminology yeah, I just needed something that would be similar meaning-wise to revmatching a downshift
you can use your rig for it! I’ve tested it on my buddy’s logitech rig (Edit I see you got it working but there’s still some weirdness, sorry about that. each one is different and the sens range on one wheel might not work on another. weird that it didn’t detect your brake pedal though?
it is a lot with your fingers lol, you gotta be fast. I did intend it to be a little weird though because it’s weird IRL. I personally prefer playing on the controller.
the next button in the tutorial should be selected by default though, that makes sense
the heel toe tutorial detector is a little too strict, I should make it detect the heel toe you did
you can use the d-pad to go left and right in the tutorials, i should really add prompts for that
holy shit i autohide the cursor but didn’t realize it would do that and then not unhide when timescale is 0, i need to fix that
I should show a button prompt for the nitro, i noticed you weren’t using it
dumping the clutch to do a burnout would be SICK actually. the issue is that I need to balance the tire grip, they’re currently insanely grippy so the car can accelerate fast but i gotta turn that off somehow
i gotta add a prompt for restarting in the tutorial
also gotta add a prompt for handbrake drifting in the interactive tutorial
need to change respawn to restart
need to say nitro resets on completing a hot lap
nitro upshifts you automatically, I should say that. it’s hard because otherwise you would immediately over-rev the engine when boosting, and fucking with the gear ratios while boosting actually felt really bad to play no matter how much i tweaked it
damn i’m watching your last video now and you did improve a lot. but maybe that means i need to raise the skill floor of the tracks too. i guess part of it was the technical issues I detailed above
i left comments on the videos at timestamps, mostly compliments but some answers
thanks again for all these videos man, not cringe at all. if anything I was cringing seeing you hit stuff I didn’t notice existed. let me know if you want me to put you in the credits for helping playtest
Never got into driving games + I don't have a license so a lot of the driving stuff flew over my head.
I think it's probably fine since most of the audience for this would know enough about driving, but it is also a really technical game so some things like downshifting might need better explanations of what it does and why to do it. Minimally, showing the key combination for doing it in the tutorial would help a lot, since I only found the gas and brake keys by trial and error during the tutorial. I still don't know how to properly start the car, either.
(It's probably my fault for not picking the easier control modes, though.)
Ended up off course quite a lot, and the engine needing to be started again was unexpected. Some kind of reposition or quick restart might be handy for those cases.
I would probably enjoy this a lot more if I could actually drive.
thanks for playing! even more respect since it’s not your thing. i definitely need to add more to the tutorial as another playtester commented. doing clutch for your first run is also deranged though, props.
you can quick restart by holding clutch and pressing X (on an xbox controller) or just X if you’re not in clutch shifting mode.
Comments
Love shifting gears and having the engine cut out. Also the reverb on the engine sounds in the tunnel. My computer is kind of shit right now so I couldn't really get a good enough framerate to play it properly, so this might not be useful, but if you want to see me try and figure out the game, here's a vod. It'll be gone in a few days. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2717183675?t=0h20m7s
oh man, that framerate is ROUGH haha. I’ll make another pass with optimization, at the very least turning down motion blur might help in the future. Thanks for playing!
I have no competences in driving but always liked racing games so i love the idea to gamify racing skill with a arcade aesthetics, I felt to play with full clutch cause playing your game like an arcade with "bad turning" would probably feel meaningless
at the same time I couldn't earn any medal other than Bronze ones, and I would dare even to consider a "wood medal" to say that at least you complete at least a lap no matter the time.
Also the car would start sliding on the road if I'm stopping on a slope, even with break and handbreak on.
I'm looking forward to future demos.
P.S.: for some reason I couldn't make Paddle shift to work, shift up or down won't change gear, I've played with Linux with Proton and I'm playing on Keyboard.
Hmm, weird. I’ll ask a friend with Linux to give it a try before the next demo.
I will also add gold time overrides. I wanted to set a competitive author time for tracks, but that results in a really hard gold time on early tracks where I want to reward the player with an early gold medal.
Also yes. I will fix my tire slip model in the future. Thanks for playing.
surprisingly in depth gear shifting mechanics.
the keyboard controls are kind of weird, is the game designed with controllers in mind? why would you put the pause menu on the X button? lol
definitely not my kind of thing but the sim angle could work very well for car enthusiasts
This was my experience with the game: I truned it on, and chose the Paddle setup. Seemed interesting to manually put the gears. I hopped into the tutorial, and it was quite technical! A lot of terminology that I was not very familiar with (at least in english) made it a bit overwhelming to follow the first tutorial. The controls are not complex, but demand a bit of coordination. I had to get used to them. But I was able to complete the 6 stages of that first tutorial. Then I advanced to the second tutorial, and here things got strange. The first tutorial taught me to hold "L1" and then input the gear with the Right stick. Here on this tutorial, the game starts me at 1st gear, If I press "L1", the gear changes to Neutral, and then Reverse, and I could not find a way to get out of Reverse. It was very strange. I thought that might have been some quirk of that tutorial, so I tried stage 01, but I got the same behaviour. So I am really confused about how am I supposed to play this game.
Besides my inability yo play the game, presentation feels very nice. There is a good level of polish to the whole game. You obviously also put a lot of effort in the simulation of driving a car.
I guess my 2 cents here are to (if this is your goal) ease in people like me, a lot slower. Game is very technical, so it's easy to be overwhelmed.
Paddle shifting mode just uses L1 and R1 to switch gears, without any holding L1 and moving RS. You don’t need to do the Manual tutorial if you have that enabled, but I should definitely make it clearer. Thanks for giving it a try!
Ohhh, I see. So what got me confussed is that I selected paddle, but then I did the Tutorial 0, which was specifically for fully mannual.
Maybe a solution here would be to have the tutorials for each mode in different categories, or disable them alltogether depending on which set up you choose.
I'll give the game another try know that I have this knowledge.
Coolest fucking menus. My idiot fingers can’t play this on a keyboard. Love the aesthetic, engine sounds, and attention to detail with the clutch and gearing, so will try again with controller (eventually).
Playing on the keyboard is a bit hard because everything focus on using a gamepad. Couldn’t play the tutorials because the UI is gamepad focused, but decided to play with automatically gear even tho I’m not used to it nor have a driver’s license.
I’m not much into racing games (I do enjoy them, but my favourite one is Halo Reach Custom Race, lmao).
Below are some of my takes about the game, sorted by “importance”:
I feel that you should show at all times the times you need to beat each “level” (the bronze/silver/gold thing). Maybe even show their ghosts at all times.
I do feel this game will get cooler the better I play
It would be cool to be able to import ghosts if you are not planning to have online multiplayer. The ghosts directory only have author/player ghost so I guess it’s hard-coded right now.
I feel the game is pretty good for people who enjoy time-attack modes. Not sure how this will translate to actual gamers, tho.
What made me want to play this was the Speed Racer, Hotwheels style tracks, but I’m still learning and playing the first track.
I feel that a first person camera would be cool, but I’m not sure.
I feel I needed more steer control
I never used the boost.
This is how I mapped the keyboard:
Settings:
Specs: Linux Fedora 42, 8 GB RAM, i5 4th gen, RX 550 2GB, 1080p. I didnt check the framerate but I’m pretty sure it’s 60 FPS all the time.
thanks for playing!
numpad numbers to shift gear is insane though, if that strat worked for you then hell yeah. especially if you don’t drive you’re a madman
Can’t find the first person camera.
The steer control is due to keyboards being digital, 0/1, no in-betweens, so that would need a hacky-fix, I would only try to “fix” this if more players complains about the same thing.
This is why I like Halo Custom Race so much, you can steer “analogically” using your mouse, Euro Truck also do the same. To be honest one of the reasons I started doing gamedev was to make a VR Speed Racer game that you could steer the same way as in Halo. Sorry about this useless comment.
Now that I’m a bit better I’m using boost. I took some driving classes from a friend but I was too scared to pass the 2nd gear, lmao. I liked a lot this keybinding I’m using.
My mistake. I accidentally unbound the cycle camera button in the keyboard controls. It’s in Camera > Cycle Camera in the keybind settings.
There are ways to get around the arrow issue that I haven’t implemented. One potential way is to make the steering input “heavy” so you have to hold a direction for half a second or whatever to pull the input all the way left or right.
Another way that I practiced a lot with Trackmania is just rapidly tapping the arrows. But I think Trackmania physics are balanced around that, whereas Neodrive is not.
Much further down the line, I will probably add other cars that are more forgiving to drive on keyboard.
VR Speed Racer sounds sickening. I played BallisticNG in VR with the cockpit view once and got too nauseated to keep playing.
I like that the tracks are designed so you can see what's ahead of you. It made it possible for me to go around the track even at 4FPS on my oldest xbox known to man.
nice art
nice drum & base
but thing is, i chose paddle, then I used the keys that were in the keys settings for paddle up / down but it wouldnt go out of neutral????
also ESC should exit options not have to scroll down to done
so i played it in auto and yeah it seems pretty cool
Had fun with this, I'm a big racing game guy and this has a good feel to it. I think the game has a little bit of an identity crisis, to me the driving feels like a pretty casual arcade game but you're trying to do a full gearbox simulation which I don't think aligns. I had way more fun when I turned off the manual mode.
Anyways I uploaded all my gameplay to youtube. I ramble a lot and I'm pretty cringe, but I know seeing video can help understand how players interact with your game. So if it's helpful, cool. If not no need to watch them.
yo thanks so much for the stream and the comments, I have a bunch of stuff to change based on this but I’ll also respond here
thanks again for all these videos man, not cringe at all. if anything I was cringing seeing you hit stuff I didn’t notice existed. let me know if you want me to put you in the credits for helping playtest
I'd be honored to be in the credits! I'll definitely play again at some point, next DD or next big release you do.
Never got into driving games + I don't have a license so a lot of the driving stuff flew over my head.
I think it's probably fine since most of the audience for this would know enough about driving, but it is also a really technical game so some things like downshifting might need better explanations of what it does and why to do it. Minimally, showing the key combination for doing it in the tutorial would help a lot, since I only found the gas and brake keys by trial and error during the tutorial. I still don't know how to properly start the car, either.
(It's probably my fault for not picking the easier control modes, though.)
Ended up off course quite a lot, and the engine needing to be started again was unexpected. Some kind of reposition or quick restart might be handy for those cases.
I would probably enjoy this a lot more if I could actually drive.
thanks for playing! even more respect since it’s not your thing. i definitely need to add more to the tutorial as another playtester commented. doing clutch for your first run is also deranged though, props.
you can quick restart by holding clutch and pressing X (on an xbox controller) or just X if you’re not in clutch shifting mode.
way too many changes since the last DD to list here, but these are the big ones: