Thoughts on the different levels Level 1: This level was where I proved to myself that sometimes there's no secret trick to posting a great time. Just cut hard, boost, take dead aim; cut hard, boost, take dead aim; cut hard, boost, take dead aim. Basically just following the rules laid down by the great master. (Reading Winter's posts gave me confidence that I could go back and beat my best times.) Level 4: I like the puzzle aspect of Ground Effect that shines through in levels like this. But this level is the one that I dreaded working on most when I started the process of mining milliseconds. This one and 13 and 14 have so many unknowns.... I'm sure lots of people get excited by all that opportunity, but it makes me sort of uneasy. Oh, and I hate doing U-turns with the clock ticking! Level 6: My favorite? This is the level where everything suddenly clicked. Levels 8, 9, 10 and 11: I love how you can race and race on these levels, and get pretty good times, but still you might not have discovered the awesome shortcuts nestled quietly in the landscape like Easter eggs. Some of them are much easier to find than others. I was probably 2nd place on the leader board before I discovered one of them. Shortcuts are one of my favorite things about Ground Effect. Especially the tricky ones. They all seem to have a discoverable method of approach that will virtually rule out the possibility of crashing - but it took me awhile to figure some of them out! (Happily, each one makes sense once it's figured out.) Level 12: Except this one. This level contains the mother of all shortcuts, but I can never hit it properly when I need it. And I've practiced. Anybody else know which one I'm talking about? I feel like I could shave 3 seconds off this course if I could figure it out. Levels 13 and 14: Very satisfying to figure these levels out. Particularly 14. Like level 4, they aren't my favorite style of level, but they do a great job rounding out the game.
I haven't played more than the first 4 courses but I found 3 to be very interesting...okay read nightmare for the longest time until I got better at the controls. That really is the key to posting good times. Of course well timed boost work wonders also. The replayability is terrific, trying to shave that tenth or 100th of a second and trying to move up on the leader board. Now to find more time to get back to playing it. I was very surprised to see this for free. For the people out there I hope they pick up this excellent racing game while its free. For the developer I hope you get lots of good coverage from this. Anyone who puts a little time into this will see what an excellent buy this is.
Oh man, I wish I was you, Pajo! It only gets better from there. This is one of the few games that I played where I was not at all eager to finish the final level. It would be awesome to see some new levels added.
I really am not sure where you mean on level 12, is it about 3 gates back from the finish line, to the left of the road? I hate to admit it but if there is a shortcut that can save seconds, I certainly don't know about it. Maybe I should ask Mikey (my 12 year old son and the designer of that level). Do you know about the free-camera easter-egg?, I know you don't need any help but you might enjoy looking around: Pause the game. Press 2 fingers on the screen while not touching any of the buttons. Press a 3rd finger in the top left. The camera is now in free camera mode, all the controls are invisible but the left and right halves of the screen are sort of like FPS controls (left thumb=back/forward/left/right, right thumb=look). The bottom left and right corners are zoom in/out, the top right is leave free-cam, the top left is un-pause replay (this only works if you paused from a replay in the first place). This is all kind of confusing but it is more for taking screenshots than anything else, maybe you could take one of your shortcut on 12
Yes, I think that might be the one. There is a sharp, left, floating turn, followed by the first jump over a ravine. There is a vertical wall on the left, but a few times I've managed to scrape my way over this wall and cut the corner. Looking at it in free camera mode, I'm starting to question how much time it would actually save. Maybe more like 1 second. A couple weeks ago I was really confused about how it was possible to post a time like Winter posted on this course. So I started to look for shortcuts, and I became obsessed with this one. For awhile there, I was convinced that learning this shortcut would be necessary to beat the best time. I guess I was wrong - and the shortcut probably isn't nearly as cool as I convinced myself it was! But it's hard to let go of the dream.... Here's a shot of the shortcut taken in free camera mode: You have to use your left wing to climb up the wall on the left. (BTW, this is a good technique for climbing over a few other shortcuts in the game.) I probably need to face the facts and realize this isn't the great shortcut that I once hoped for. But I'd still like to be able to pull it off easily without crashing to see for myself...
If you've mastered the controls and you're ready for the real thing, you can buy a Ground Effect vehicle HERE. Of course, you'll have to out-bid me first! This guy seems to be making news all over the place!
Last night, between episodes of Lost: My Wife: "What's 'Ground Effect?'" Me: "The best racing game on the App Store. It was free yesterday so I put it on your phone." My Wife: "I like it."
I thought that was where you meant. For a while I was trying to fly out to the right near there on a full boost, in order to avoid the slow down from the uphill and potential crash of one of the nastier bumps. It didn't work because of the detour. For me that level is more about actually being able to use up all of the boost at all, but then, I suck at the game
I just thought I'd translate some suggestions from the ger. appstore that I think would be good: -Improove the vehicle explosion. it looks really cheap! -The sound when you crash/scrape along the ground is always the same. change that -Different looking Aircrafts (not the stats or the textures), we want a new 3D moddel! -bluetooth multiplayer maybe? There wouldn't be any server cost! The rest of the suggestions from that review where powerups and vehicle upgrades, but I know you don't want to change that. I marked the most (for me) important things in bold text, btw.
Thanks Der-Kleine. I have actually been reading all of the reviews in all territories. The wonderful Appfigures.com even translates them for me! Yeah, we're getting requests for a lot of things though we're also getting a hell of a lot of 5 star reviews. Sadly, we're also getting a lot of 1 star ratings s but that is kind of unavoidable when we've had over 400,000 new users in 3 days. Even if only a small percentage deletes immediately and only a small percentage of those press the 1 star button, it's still enough 1 star ratings to seriously mess up the average!
Thanks so much everyone - we now have about 100,000 OpenFeint users which should provide some competition for Glenn, Ra88it, Jeep, Winter413 etc & keep them on their toes for some time
Just thought I'd share some info with y'all following our FAAD promotion: Immediately pre FAAD, Ground Effect was selling maybe 15-20 copies per day with just under 4,000 OpenFeint users & didn't show in any top 100 chart, free or paid. During the promotion, we peaked at 1 in Racing Games, 2 in Action Games, 7 in All Games & 9 in All Apps (USA). Ground Effect was also No.1 All Apps in 5 countries including France. After 4 days of FAAD we had more than 500,000 downloads, and 100,000 OpenFeint users. We've had loads of fun and now have an enthusiastic user base of gamers who will hopefully, be interested in the next title. As we expected, the 1-star reviews have come in thick and fast. But somewhat unexpectedly, we've had some amazing 5-star reviews from people who've really fallen in love with the game. Since the promotion Ground Effect has held its own pretty much around 60-70 in Racing Games & gained an additional 25,000 OpenFeint users. Would we do it again with the benefit of hindsight? Yes, definitely! No point creating something beautiful then leaving it to gather dust! It's great to know that so many people have experienced and appreciated it after all Glenn's hard work over the past year. Thank you all for your support
Thanks for your support everyone! For those that are interested in the knowing a bit more about Glenn & the development process, here's an interview with Glenn that was published today - http://indieappolis.com/indie-interview-ground-effect/
Whatever happened to the update? In case anyone is still interested, here is a little info about the much delayed update. Some months ago we had a pile of very cool new levels, pretty much tuned and tested and were about to add them to the game but it seemed there was more stuff to do. Ipad support, multitasking, support for DLC etc... At this point the history of the project started to cause problems. Basically, Ground Effect is based on a port of a cross platform framework built for a shelved PS3 project Seen here running on a PC with a Wiimote (long story). This was ported by the other coder to iPhone right at the time I started iPhone dev. It enabled me to jump straight in and start writing the game in C++. The downside of this is that I didn't really ever learn Objective C. All of the extra stuff I added that had to talk to the iPhone libs was pretty much hacked in, I only cut and paste another 100 lines or so of objective C in the whole project! Basically, the organisation of the code meant it was very hard to add a lot of cool new features, some of them giving significant performance boosts. Because of this I've undertaken a huge rewrite of the underlying systems and learned some Objective C. I now have a version that runs faster, smoother, supports Retina and iPad and multitasks nicely. The only problem is the problem with fog on hi-res screens running GL1.1. Basically the iPad version runs at 13FPS on iPad until I turn the fog off and it runs at 40! It looks OK with the fog off but I thought this was kind of lame so I'm now making the system run with both GL1.1 and GL2.0, intending to put the fog back in and maybe some nice shinny water and/or post processing effects. This is taking a bit of time... Add to this the fact that Ground Effect is a 'spare time' thing now (I had an offer I couldn't refuse to work on a major console game and some iPhone stuff for another company) and it's taken much, much longer than I'd hoped. Basically, it's all coming together now and something with some major improvements will be released soon.
Im interested, and happy for the update! Bought this game when it came out, and it sucked up quite a bit of my time, but i haven't played it in a while. Look forward to an update, and from the sounds of it, a big one.
Great game and great news!! Actually I am a bit bored with the actual levels (37:53.91 Rank #42) and new levels will be really wellcome. And please consider to include some kind of tutorial or help pages with the update. It is hard to find your hints (and other player helpful advices) in this enormous thread... Any timeline??
question on Map1: Oval highscores hi folks, as I play Ground Effect on an Android device I can't use OpenFeint with this game. I was simply curious: could anybody post the top time of the Oval map? I have tried to get a perfect time for a while and I got 1:27:36. I'm simply curious how good this time actually is. thanks
