After about half a year of work we're very excited to announce our next game: SPEEDLAP RED - a highly focused, futuristic single-player racing game. Play it here! The game will have around 20 tracks, online highscores, achievements, unlockable vehicle-skins and professional voiceovers. All sound and music is being done by our good friend and part-time-ambient-god Photophob (http://photophob.net) We're currently aiming for a release in November, a playable demo-track of the current Beta-version is available here: http://games.blackish.at/ (Playable right there on the web using the Unity Web-Player Plugin) You heard it here first! Please let us know what you think!
We are roughly aiming in the direction of wipeout, but a couple of hundred years earlier - so that the tracks are already pretty freeform, but the vehicles still have a very physical quality (they're no hover-cars). Could you try to define what it is you don't like about the car-model in the demo? Here's another look at it from a different perspective: (Though we are aware that it's most important to make it look good from behind, as that's how you'll be seeing it most of the time) Thanks for the nice comments about the tracks, we'll be showing more soon!
The track looks fantastic but I second the comment about the car. I think it doesnt look very nice from the back. Overall, the color scheme and style of the track (futuristic, silver, clean design) doesnt match the design of the car (rugged, textured, off-road, stained).
Sure! It's the thing that the car looks old, and looks so flat. I like those futuristic models of the Wipeout series, or the modern Trackmania cars. This game probably is a istant-buy for me, but I really don't like the car model, and so others do, too. The thing is, you can't say that you're trying to make it look like hundreds of years ago, because the track looks REALLY futuristic and awesome, and with all these special effects (Turbo) and the sounds, it's better if you could make a completly different model. You can also use this one you're using right now, but maybe you could let us choose between 5-10 cars, so we can enjoy this game even more. What I personally don't like about this game is the speed. If you could implement faster cars or even more crazy tracks with more speed on'em, it would rock even more. I'd really appreciate it to be a beta tester, but I don't know if that works because I live in Switzerland But just to tell you one thing: This game looks awesome, and with a later update including Bluetooth or even better - Online Multiplayer - this is going to rock. But for the multiplayer option there should be bigger tracks which more than just one car can race on. I hope I helped you, and ask me whatever you like about ideas or other things, because I'm full of ideas for plenty of games, and I'm a hardcore gamer so I know what gamers like Best Regards. Here's a little edit: I like the leaderboards the most, that's a really great idea! This game also rocks because you can challange your speed over and over again, and it doesn't require to sit somewhere for half an hour, you can just open the app when you're bored, race some tracks, and go back to work. It's a fantastic work! here's my second edit: Bugs: - When you hold S while being respawned, youre being sucked into the track. There you can't drive anywhere, but you can go up to -81 kmh(mph?) or normal 81 kmh. - The game records your time if you race backward. More coming asap! Thanks so much for this game, I'm playing it everyday
Thanks a lot for the feedback! This is really helpful! You two are definitely right! Even though there's a bit of a gritty side to the game's world and story, it might be better to keep the art consistent with one style. We'll start with a cleaner skin for this car model and will look into creating more vehicles! Chronical: I can tell you are hardcore, because so far most people said that they found the game was too fast... We're working hard on a good difficulty curve though. We have to start just easy enough to not scare off the non-hardcore and offer enough of a challenge for hardcore players later on. Of all tracks we have finished so far, the demo-track is of medium difficulty. We've got 2 hard tracks that are all downhill and can get crazy fast. If we get around to it we might post another beta-track in a couple of weeks... We're still undecided whether or not we should have a more open beta-test - At the moment I can only say: Watch this space (and maybe our website), as we get closer to launch I'd like to mention one topic that has come up a lot: What do you all think about the fact that it's quite easy to fall off the tracks? We did design the game that way for 2 reasons: fast respawns and unique tracks. And even though we're very confident about the advantages, we're a bit scared that it might be frustrating initially. Any thoughts? Quicklink: Play it here!
I wouldn't make a open-beta, better closed beta for advanced players and for some chosen ones than some total beginners in racing games who just want this game for free. @" What do you all think about the fact that it's quite easy to fall off the tracks?" It's not that easy to fall of if you're racing the same track for about 4 times, but to be honest, I just managed to race 5 rounds until I fell down. Maybe you should add a little thing to it, that if you go into a curve you should speed up and there should be a "swoosh!!" effect, where your car gets faster The fast respawn is awesome. There's just a bug I've seen when respawning, where you have to restart the game (Reload the whole site). It's when you fall down the track and bump against the wall before you get respawned, you are being spawned into a sort of "Jumping-Loop" where your car falls into a black whole and after about 10 seconds it's just a grey-black screen. How about adding a "HARDCORE!!" difficulty setting? That would make me so happy I'm just worrying about the controls on the iPhone or iPod Touch, because there are no buttons. I myself prefer buttons on the touchscreen, because I don't like to tilt my iPhone, because sometimes it's a little bit frustrating I got another question: Is there going to be music playback in the first release? You're welcome, just ask me about any ideas and I'll answer them. I've bookmarked that page and I'm checking it every 2-7 hours I love that game, Instant-Buy for me.
Hate to make the comparison, but when I first saw that car it made me think of Pinewood Derby! Needs some windows or something...
How's this going to control? Accelerometer? Wonder how easy it'll be to control on the iPod since I've fallen off the edge about 100 times using WASD on the web demo... maybe I'm just not that good w/ racing games :/ edit: just noticed that comment above about how its easy to fall off the track...
The default control scheme will be the accelerometer for steering and touch to accelerat/brake, but we have touch-based controls working as well and might let the player choose. There's also the option to always accelerate automatically and only brake when you touch. I have to add that this is not an easy track and that the initial tracks will be less difficult. The tutorial track won't let you fall off at all until you're familiar with the controls! Chronical: You're talking about letting you choose your own music from inside the game, right? We're planning to, but it might depend on how easy it is to implement. What's working already is that if you start the game with your own music playing, it will ignore the ingame-music and keep playing yours... We'd like each track to pose exactly the same challenge to all players, so there won't be a difficulty setting as such. We're definitely going to have some hardcore tracks later in the game though! drelbs: I think the comparison to Pinewood Derby is actually pretty cool!
Yes, that's what I'm talking about. There's one thing I worry about when you start the music before you open the app - it's that it's disabling ALL sounds from the game. I'd like it to be like in Gangstar, that you can choose it before you race the track and it plays your music + special effects in the background. Oh I'm sorry I totally forgot about the leaderboards when I thought about that idea Is it just me or is the loading time on the PC for the flashgame faster than in the last few days? Hoping to see new tracks soon (or a iphone beta? )
Bump - Why the hell is nobody posting anything about this?! That sucks a little bit, 3 reviews of the browser beta is pretty nothing. Oh and, if you would release a new track or anything like this I'd really appreciate it because I got 3 weeks of holidays
No, not making a big splash so far... We've thus decided to rename the game to "Naked Alien Spaceparty Racing!!1!11" All sounds and special effects will continue to play even if you start with your own music in the background. (you can turn them off in the options if you really only want the music) Yeah, it could be loading faster now - I had forgotten to turn on texture compression on some textures before building... (Just FYI: the web version's got nothing to with flash, it's all Unity :]) Thanks for the bug-reports! And we'll see what we can do about showing another track... The main focus has to be on finishing the iPhone version though at the moment, so no promises...
Are you serious?! xD that name would so suck. Speedlap Red is a really good name for a game. Cool that you didn't have to mute all the sounds, that's a big + for me. I always wanted to play Electronic/Dance/Hip Hop or even Wipeout soundtracks in a racing game. Sorry I forgot about that that it's a Unity-game, but it doesn't really matter how I call it, right? Have you got any art for the new car concept yet? I'd really like to see more, can't wait for that game. You'll see my name on the leaderboards somewhere between 1 and 5 for sure Thanks for your reply BUG: - If you drive over one of the red things from there the time is being counted and you drive backward again and repeat that all the time you can get a uber round score. that means you don't have to drive the whole round to let the game think that you just made one round. --- Oh and my record is 3.32 and I made 110 rounds without the bug I mentioned above
Please note that even though the game displays a new lap number and the time starts counting from zero again, the time only counts if you passed all checkpoints and if you passed them in the right order. Only then does it show the laptime + time difference and adds the lap to highscores. (If the lap didn't count it only shows a number - the total amount of laps started on this track. we also count the finished laps, you'll be able to look at those on the stats page in the options) - Maybe we should add a message though, something like "Lap Incomplete". No new vehicles yet, we decided to try and get all the tracks done first... And that's all we do at the moment - model, try, change and texture tracks
yes that would be cool! Did you mean that I meant the highscore? I just meant that the Unity-Game ( ) does count such a lap like a normal one. Ok, first the extreme tracks then the car maybe the car could be white with stripes on it which change the color with the track, wouldn't that be cool? Also could you use clouds as background for a day-track? that would also be cool.
I tried the plugin beta demo about a week ago and I quite like it. I like that it's easy to fall off the track as it demands more skill than simply barrelling down the track. It's definitely fun chasing your own ghost while trying to improve your time. That kind of reminds me of Trackmania. I guess this is the first track since it's pretty simple. Might we see such things as loops or corkscrews on later tracks? I'm definitely keeping my eyes on this one.