Over the Christmas break I had a spare week after a trip to Ireland was cancelled. What should I do with the time? I was already aware of the upcoming DreamDisc ‘24 game jam and had done some reading a couple of months back scoping out a Lua-based SDK called ANTIRUINS Engine that looked familiar enough to me with my experience of LÖVE (love2d) and Playdate SDK. But what should I make with it?
If I could get something fun up and running as quickly as possible it would prove the point and keep me motivated. Sounds like a plan. Also, it’s easier to make something that has already been planned out, so all the effort goes on implementation rather than design. I remembered my unreleased game Daily Driver…maybe I could get those little cars moving around the screen? But what would make it more Dreamcast? Simultaneous 4-player action and CPU opponents! OK, let’s do this!
It took a bit of effort to get the build process setup, but after that I hit the ground running. I got the physics and 4-player control working pretty quickly. Then the sprites went in, albeit in the wrong colours. Physics equation and sprites are the only two things shared with Daily Driver. Next I added a variety of game modes, power-ups, new sounds, all within a few days. Then I picked at it over the next week to polish it as much as possible before the game jam deadline. I thrive on deadlines.
Many thanks to Bertholet, author of ANTIRUINS Engine, who has done a great job and was very gracious with his time helping me through the initial hurdles.
I’ll do a full post-mortem and “what’s next” after the game jam results are announced. But I’m really happy with how it turned out. The cars look great in colour, and even with 8 of them on screen things are a rock solid 60fps, I really need to see how far I can push things.
Download
gingerbeardman.itch.io/dream-ride
Play DREAM RIDE on real hardware (tested on my original imported NTSC-U Sega Dreamcast from 1999, fitted with a GDEMU) or in an emulator on your favourite console or handheld (tested with Flycast on macOS, GameForce Chi, Powkiddy RGB30, TrimUI Brick, and a modded Nintendo Switch).
Future versions of the game with improvements and new modes will require payment, after all I’m a full-time indie developer and my caffeine intake needs to be maintained. Thanks for your support!
Video
Below is a video where I forgot to switch audio source so it recorded audio through my Mac’s mic. 😅
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