Restarting a 10 year old project
10 years ago I released something called "Press X to Ride" as a part of a game jam where unfinished prototypes were released. That is a long ass time ago! The idea of a road trip game has always been in my head and I've wanted to tackle it for some time. But technical constraints and my own I guess hangups have been roadblocks. Latley though the urge to go back has been pretty big, so I decided to come back to the idea.
At the time I was really facinated with the game Fuel, an off roading game with a massive open world that you could drive around; it took an hour to drive from one end of the map to the other. I would get a motorcycle and put on Bob Dylan records and just explore the game's world and it was pretty good. Then the game Jalopey came out, and I really liked the idea of having a survival game attached to a driving game. Eventually The Long Drive, No Man's Sky, and Slow Roads would present different iterations of something that I would want to play but not quite get there.
The Long Drive, which I've spent hours in and greatly enjoyed, has it's own sense of humor which is sometimes vulger but not in a mean way. It's made by a bunch of dudes from Eastern Europe who like to goof off and make youtube videos and despite a lack of technical knowledge they pulled of a pretty compelling drive and scavenge game loop full of lonely roads and endless rolling hills. It's a game about managing resources as physics objects that can tumble around your car. It's very satisfying to find a better car and literally build it up with the best parts you can find and go very far.
But! You really don't "go" anywhere in The Long Drive. All the destinations are abandoned buildings on the side of the road. I played a game called "Drive Beyond Horizons" which is the same game rebuilt in the Unreal engine. It looks pretty good, but it is the EXACT same game, down to random resource drops and things you can pick up. The developers brought zero new ideas to the game except "Game but in Unreal". I was really disappointed.
Slow Roads is closer to what I would want, but I also feel like I never "go" anywhere and it's mainly an interactive screensaver - but it's a very nice one! I like how it generates complex landscapes with lakes, forests, hills, etc. but it's still really uniform, you have to stop and switch the generation settings if you want different roads.
So this game I want to make would be a game where you "go" somewhere, with different biomes. Importantly it has intersections, towns, roadside stops, things of that nature. You can get out of the car and walk around. You have to stay in dingy roadside hotels, stop and get snacks, or whatnot. Enough "friction" to give the player a reason to stop driving for a minute.
With the version of 10 years ago I had some form of endless terrain working, and rudimentary road generation. I had to implement splines and road mesh generation myself and at the time it was pretty basic. But you could get in and out of the car and drive for a period of time and it looked nice
One of the big technical problems is floating point math breaks down after getting too far from 0,0,0. Another one was: how do I generate endless roads that won't break down after a certain distance? I couldn't figure out how, and shelved the project for a decade.
A while ago I started a new project in Godot and slapped a pretty ok Vehicle Simulation from the asset library on top of a pretty ok Endless Terrain script also from the godot asset library. Then it sat for a while. Then I discovered that Godot has it's own implementation of splines, and you can extrude a CSG shape over it at runtime. I had my road.
So yes, next is the tricky problem of "origin shifting" to get around floating point problems. and then generating an endless road beyond what gets spit out when the game first loads. I feel like I'm really making this game for myself, since I really really just want to get on a bike and ride forever sometimes!