BEWARE - autumn info about the state of development (Patreon)

Hello everyone! First of all, I hope you're all doing good in these now seemingly never-ending challenging times. For my part, living in Germany now, I can say that the doomsday predictions are not happening. Yet. Knocking on wood.

Here's a brief description of what I've been working on during the past months.

1) First of all, although the preliminary work on adapting the driving AI code for the new car physics, and more slippery tire behavior, looked promising, I've spent a good chunk of time re-writing the code so that it behaves more predictably. I've also spent a lot of time adding a new "slow" mode, which will come handy for adjusting difficulty and a more engaging driving experience. Here's a comparison between fast and slow modes:

I've also added new code so that the pursuers will know which intersection the player is driving towards. This will make inter-goon cooperation more effective (and realistic).

2) Since the first car was a placeholder I thought it would be nice to create the final model for v012. This process took surprisingly long, over a month of work - modeling the car completely from scratch and trying out different original designs for the final look. This includes designing a new logo for all "goon" cars, custom bull bars and the roof-mounted searchlights. Fortunately, the second car is my own model so I can just add those elements to it. Anyway I'll have to figure out something to accelerate the process with the remaining cars as my overly perfectionist attitude is hindering the pace of development.

3) In the summer, I took 5 days off to check out RFactor2, which I bought on sale - and long story short, in my opinion BEWARE holds up very well. I tried some R/R cars in wet conditions and it felt almost the same, except they were harder to slide around in RF2, mostly due to the small steering lock ranges. But yeah, I felt I should test other driving games once in a while.

4) Finally, this last week, I started designing the look of the power-plant security guys a.k.a. goons, but I'm going to stop that for now and finish work on the driving A.I. so I can release v012 as soon as possible, now that the driving code is working as expected. I just have to revisit some  parts like the combat/car stopping behavior and avoidance steering.

Here's a very WIP version of goon gear (Helmet + gas mask):

Looking forward to read your suggestions in the comments!

Best wishes and big thanks for your support,

Ondrej