Wreckless

Wreckless is a driving/racing game with lots of traffic but NO driving.  You're just a passenger in the car.   The (pretty terrible) driver ignores you completely, while everyone else responds to your SPEED UP or SLOW DOWN commands.  Drive for as long as you can without causing too much wreckage!

[Wreckless is my entry into the GMTK 2023 Game Jam (Roles Reversed), and my first game jam (been working on games for a while). ]

CONTROLS

Use the mouse button to select any cars (except the one you're in) and tell them to speed up or slow down.  They respond immediately, though that can put them in danger.  Nobody except your driver seems to want to change lanes, but they'll try it if trapped for a while.  

Also note that the Wreckage meter cares most about what you do/hit, while nearby crashes you didn't do will somewhat affect it, and things that happen further away will barely change it.

ABOUT THE GAME

This is my first Game Jam, but not my first game.  I came up with about 10 rough ideas for the theme in the first couple hours, but this one stood out to me because I doubted anyone else would do it, and I've made a racing game with lots of traffic before.  The second-place idea was to create a racing game where you lifted the corners of the track to try to get the racers to the finish line.

The original idea is actually not what you see.  I was trying to make a game where you were interfering with a Cops vs. Robbers getaway (block the cops, let robbers through, and maybe vice-versa), but it was not working once I got the Getaway cars in the game.  The action was too fast and it was too difficult to get the cars behaving like I imagined.  Your controls were also supposed to be making the drivers change lanes, not go faster/slower.

This was about half way through the jam that I realized I had to change things up.  I had the traffic working pretty well, but the Getaway cars either felt slow (boring), or the physics/traffic went all to hell with faster Getaway cars.  I've been up for the last 30 hours so I don't remember exactly how it morphed into the new version, but I think the key change was actually the controls.  I made the traffic change lanes on their own, but then reduced the amount they would do that to almost never.  

Once I switched to speed up/slow down for the 2 mouse buttons, the Getaway car changed to just being an obnoxious driver who won't slow down.  From there it was just balancing/tuning/etc for the design side of things.  The Wreckage meter made the whole thing feel more cohesive/purposeful.

WHAT I MADE VS. DIDN'T

I started with a simple skeleton project that I made for 2D projects, but it wasn't terribly useful aside from the UI system and basic game logic.  The models for the 3 traffic cars were adapted and rebuilt from another project I worked on (Instruments of Destruction).  Most of the rest of the art is new models.  The shaders/materials were adapted from multiple other projects as needed.  I ended up using Unity's built-in particle system since I couldn't get my custom system to behave well in the time needed.  

Sound effects were borrowed from lots of my previous games, while music is from Fluid SE (wrote it about 10 years ago).  I wanted to write a new song but ran out of time since the physics/AI/design ended up taking so long the first 1.5 days.  All the AI/physics/logic code is new, and that's the stuff I spent the most time.

BUGS/DEBUG STUFF/ETC

The main camera freaks out when you resize the window, but just get the size you want and restart.  Too tired to figure it out before the deadline, sorry!  There are some debug controls for the camera (Arrow keys, PgUp/Dn, and F3/F4), and U will turn off the UI.  Will add any other bugs/tips down here if needed.