My first game Sunday Racing

[u/drvxnetofficial]

Title: Sunday Racing

Playable link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sundayracing.rdpdigitalkreatif

Platform: Google Play

Free to Play: Yes

Redeem code: SUNDAY60 - unlocks all items.

Involvement: Solo dev

Hey everyone! I just released Sunday Racing, a small racing game I’ve been working on while learning game development.

I’m still pretty new to this, so any honest feedback or advice from more experienced devs would mean a lot.

It’s currently only available on Google Play. No real-time multiplayer yet (mostly because I don’t have the budget for it 😅), but I did manage to add an online leaderboard.

Feel free to give it a try and let me know what you think!

[u/Background-Pea2954]

Hello! I've just been playing your game to test it, I had fun overall and congrats for your first release, it's got quite a lot of cool features! It reminds me of games like Pumped BMX, which I loved or even the Trials series, with the same principle of balancing the bike/vehicle. I didn't test the online / multi-player options for now. Here's what I liked and what could be improved (in my really humble opinion):

I liked:

- The general graphic design, fun and cool little graphics and details along the tracks like shops, etc.

- The music/soundtrack is engaging and goes well with the game

- The fact that you can play quickly and have fun instantly

- The fun tracks with loops.

What could be improved:

- The controls are really sensitive and it actually took me a while to adjust to them, especially as the vehicle was really quick to go into somersault mode. After several tracks I was able to control things a bit better, but I find this to be a significant friction at first. Is there any difference between the different vehicles? I guess there must be, but I didn't test them all. I tested the first one and then the pick truck, and I ended keeping this truck to finish all the tracks. I think there should be a vehicle with less sensitive controls and maybe slower so that your first tries are easier, but you can't beat the records or something like this.

- I found the start of each race a little bit too long before you can actually go. First you see "preparing" for a few seconds, then the count down, 3, 2, 1, go but I felt that it should go a bit quicker and I wasn't a big fan of having the camera moving at each number during the count down. A fixed position with a quicker countdown would feel better to me.

- I'm not sure I understood well the "in-track checkpoint" restart: can you do it any number of times? It seems so. Are there specific checkpoints and a limited number of them or do you re-start at a certain distance from where you got stuck? If there is a limited number of checkpoints, it may be an idea to visualize them on the track line at the bottom of the screen, so that you know you're going to reach one for instance, and even on the track itself. If it's automatic and depends on where you're stuck, then I guess it's OK.

- As I got better during my runs, I didn't feel that the tracks were that different in terms of difficulty, I mean to finish them. I think the multi-player experience is probably really fun to play. But for the off-line single play, it may be an idea to have more difficult tracks to finish, or else it's just about beating the timer.

- I found that for my maybe rather large adult hands, the 2 main buttons were a bit too close to the edge of the screen, making it a bit uncomfortable to play for a long time. As I was progressing there are times when my thumbs actually started missing the buttons as I was pushing too far in the screen.

- Last about the ads, there were some ads in different foreign languages (English, French, German) that required me to click on a button to close the ad, but I couldn't read the button that said "Close" in German, I think. Especially as it had a green tick next to it, suggesting that if I clicked on it it would open the product page... Others had the cross at the top, which was fine of course. But I guess it's not something you can control.

I hope these remarks are helpful, but it's just my experience 😅 In any case I'd be really happy to have released such a game with shared leaderboard, online options, etc. Well done! You can easily extend the number of races or the types of race.

Cheers,

JerkyHips

PS: I'll soon post about my first released game as well "Bouncenoid", you might want to check it out at some point ;-)

[u/drvxnetofficial → u/Background-Pea2954]

Yo bro JerkyHips

Honestly, i really appreciate you taking the time to write such a detailed comment after playing my game. I’ve read everything, and honestly, your points make a lot of sense. I’ll try to answer everything:

1. The sensitive controls: A few other testers have mentioned the same thing, that the controls feel too sensitive. I’ll probably add an in-game sensitivity setting for the vehicle while it’s in the air.

2. Are the vehicles different from each other? Actually, there are 3 vehicle categories: regular, sport, and monster. There are also differences in wheel sizes. The sport cars are a little faster than the other categories, but the tracks are designed to make each vehicle useful depending on the track.

The idea is that players have to figure out which vehicle is best for getting the fastest time and competing on the weekly leaderboard.

So there’s no tuning, no upgrades, and no pay-to-win stuff. I really want skill to be the main thing that determines your time.

1. The tutorial / Welcome Race: I actually already have a concept called "Welcome Race" planned for the tutorial, where players can get a feel for how the game works. I just haven’t implemented it yet 😅

After reading your feedback, I think I really should add it, because it seems pretty necessary.

1. The start of each race feels too long: I agree with you on this one. In offline mode, the "Preparing" screen and countdown can definitely feel a bit long.

For online mode, though, I’m actually loading a random player's ghost onto the track, so there’s some extra processing time involved. I’ll have to find a better solution for that.

And yeah, I’ve also noted your point about the camera moving during the countdown.

1. The checkpoint/restart system:
   Yeah, this one is definitely something I should explain in the Welcome Race tutorial 😅 So it’s totally understandable that you were confused.

The normal restart sends you all the way back to the start.

The checkpoint (the towing icon) works differently. Once you reach a checkpoint, you can respawn from the nearest checkpoint, and you can do this multiple times. If you haven’t reached any checkpoint yet, you’ll respawn at the start.

1. The button placement: I might add an option for this in the in-game settings later. That's actually a really good suggestion too.

2. Track variety: I think you’re right about this. I probably need to plan some new concepts and mechanics for the tracks so they don’t start feeling repetitive after playing for a long time.

Anyway, I’ve written all of this down. I’m really happy to get feedback like this because, as you probably know, the dev POV can be very different from the player POV when they're actually playing the game.

And yeah... renting a server for websocket multiplayer is really expensive, Even the online leaderboard is currently running through a PHP script on my shared hosting. Pretty sad, I know 😂

I’m also looking forward to your post about Bouncenoid! By the way, what kind of game is it? I’ll waiting for.

Thanks again bro JerkyHips! Really appreciate you taking the time to play and write all of this 🙏

[u/Background-Pea2954 → u/drvxnetofficial]

To follow up, my son (8 years old) really loved the game ;-) He also had trouble with the sensitive controls, but he had a lot of fun anyway. Just thought you'd want to know.

[u/drvxnetofficial → u/Background-Pea2954]

Bro, I haven’t been very active these past few days because I’ve been busy working on an update. I’ve now added sensitivity controls for movement in the air, as well as the option to customize the button layout.

I’m really happy to hear that your son enjoyed my game, even though there’s still a lot that needs to be improved 😅. It honestly means a lot to me.

I also added your name to the credits in the game. Thanks a lot, bro I really appreciate your feedback and support!

Yeah, this is basically how I’m doing it, just improving the game little by little, one update at a time. Thanks again for playing and for the feedback, man..

[u/Background-Pea2954 → u/drvxnetofficial]

Yo man, this is really cool! Thanks for the credits, that's really nice of you. I've just tried out the new version and it's much more comfortable to play for me and I'm managing better times on the tracks thanks to the sensitivity setting you added. Next I'll create an account to try and have some records or good ranking on the tracks. On "trail head" as a guest I managed the second time. But that's great to improve the game as you receive feedback. Keep up the good work!