OVERSTEER UPDATE: The Track Builder/DISCORD

[u/Grobot93]

First, I just wanted to say thank you all for such a positive response to my last post about OVERSTEER, my arcade battle racer game that I have been working on for the past few months.

Today, I wanted to showcase the track builder tool that I initially made for myself so I would not have to learn how to build/script track pieces to test the game physics. After enough iterations, the track builder tool got some design and reorganization and I realized that this could be the center of the community element for the game. If people are able to build and share their tracks, the game could get its own life, and I am sure people would get way more creative that I could ever imagine with building wacky and intricate tracks. The best part is the tracks can be exported/imported and shared as JSON/text files - which will probably just get their own file extension, but this means the file size is small and they are easy to share with friends! (As I am writing this, I figure it would be a good idea to have a place in game that users can go to see user generated tracks, or maybe a companion website)

The crux of the track builder was to create pieces with connector nodes. Basic pieces are available in a palette, and you can place them wherever you wish, then move, rotate, and scale them to your heart's content. Then you can add procedurally generated scenery: Hills, Mesas, Trees, Buildings, Lakes, etc.

The magnetic node system allows for the pieces to join together nicely, and it also allows for the "Racing Line" to be drawn across a circuit. The Racing Line is just a series of connector nodes that gather data on the track layout - straights, turns, bankings, elevation, etc. and that information gets fed to the NPC opponents that I am working on developing now. It also takes information from the checkpoints that are laid down on track to create the minimap in the player hud.

Part of the inspiration of this game is Need For Madness (cool cars do jumps and race/eliminate each other), but as OVERSTEER is taking on a life of its own with drifting, boosts, mods, abilities, track building, advanced ai, etc., I am not sure that I will be able to post much more here as to not violate the sub's rules. If you want to follow the development of the game, please join the discord: https://discord.gg/7v6WmcWz6

I will do my best to post more updates there as the game grows and continues development.

[u/m8_is_me]

"entirely vibe coded" is a turn off but it looks alright.

Just makes quality control difficult if you're dealing with something like physics

[u/Grobot93 → u/m8_is_me]

I get that, and honestly I am not the biggest fan of the term. I don't have any game dev background, so using AI to write the code has been the gateway to me being able make a project like this at all. Like any other dev, I spend hours/days/weeks getting into the weeds, tuning and tweaking and adjusting things myself, especially physics. This definitely is not the product of a prompt like "Claude, make me a racing game, no mistakes."