Today I am excited to share my new game Dr1v3n Wild, which is a 13k driving game inspired by OutRun. The entire game, graphics, code, art, sound, etc fits in a 13 kilobyte zip file. The code is...
Today I am excited to share my new game Dr1v3n Wild, which is a 13k driving game inspired by OutRun. The entire game, graphics, code, art, sound, etc fits in a 13 kilobyte zip file. The code is also opensource. This build is identical to the 13K version with extra support for touch and gamepads. It should run nicely on pretty my any modern device. Enjoy!
This was made for the JS13k competition, you can see my entry's official page here...
Awesome contribution!!! I ended up getting to stage 10 before running out of time. Definitely hits of nostalgia and a very accessible game for anyone to jump into!
Awesome contribution!!! I ended up getting to stage 10 before running out of time. Definitely hits of nostalgia and a very accessible game for anyone to jump into!
Thanks, that's my thought too. I've made many games but this one seems like it may be the most accessible and playable by the widest range of audience. It sounds like I have difficulty tuned...
Thanks, that's my thought too. I've made many games but this one seems like it may be the most accessible and playable by the widest range of audience. It sounds like I have difficulty tuned pretty well then, that is near the end. I hope you manage to finish in your next run.
Very nice! As a kid, my brother and I sunk a lot of time into 8-bit driving games with worse graphics, and I played a fair bit of Outrun in the arcade. :-) The main thing I'm missing compared to...
Very nice! As a kid, my brother and I sunk a lot of time into 8-bit driving games with worse graphics, and I played a fair bit of Outrun in the arcade. :-)
The main thing I'm missing compared to Outrun is the soundtrack, but you could play it separately.
Thanks, I was also a big fan of Outrun, and also Road Rash which considered making instead of this. Maybe nest year. I wanted so bad to include a sound track that had the ui for a radio and 3...
Thanks, I was also a big fan of Outrun, and also Road Rash which considered making instead of this. Maybe nest year. I wanted so bad to include a sound track that had the ui for a radio and 3 buttons set up but cut all that and music to save space and time.
Wow this is amazing. I kept getting surprised by the differences in the levels. I look forward to checking out the source code. I did a lot better once I figured out you don't have to use the...
Wow this is amazing. I kept getting surprised by the differences in the levels. I look forward to checking out the source code.
I did a lot better once I figured out you don't have to use the mouse. Also found some undocumented things while I was trying every key on the keyboard :)
This was great! Reminded me of those racing arcade games in the 90s as a kid. Which maybe these still exist? Idk. Either way, I got to Stage 8! Why are there rocks in the road? Where is the local...
This was great! Reminded me of those racing arcade games in the 90s as a kid. Which maybe these still exist? Idk.
Either way, I got to Stage 8! Why are there rocks in the road? Where is the local DoT??
Stage 8 is the jungle, that is like an offroad vibe with no other cars. If you get past that there are no more rocks in the road and stage 10 is the final one.
Stage 8 is the jungle, that is like an offroad vibe with no other cars. If you get past that there are no more rocks in the road and stage 10 is the final one.
I don't have money to donate and I don't want to volunteer but when something is important to me I try to say something about it. Hopefully it is not too heavy handed in this game.
I don't have money to donate and I don't want to volunteer but when something is important to me I try to say something about it. Hopefully it is not too heavy handed in this game.
I'm not sure it's possible to beat on mobile, at least on my phone. But I pulled it up on my desktop and was able to play all the way through with a time of 6:46.516, feel like I can definitely...
I'm not sure it's possible to beat on mobile, at least on my phone. But I pulled it up on my desktop and was able to play all the way through with a time of 6:46.516, feel like I can definitely beat that time though. Reminds me a lot of a few browser flash games I really like and played as a kid!
Nice, thanks for playing! Was it running slow on your phone, or just difficult to control with touch? I honestly have not beaten it on mobile either, I will give it a shot tomorrow.
Nice, thanks for playing! Was it running slow on your phone, or just difficult to control with touch? I honestly have not beaten it on mobile either, I will give it a shot tomorrow.
In portrait I found I was having a hard time anticipating upcoming turns and couldn't plan what lane would be best to avoid hitting a car. It's also a little tricky to modulate speed compared to...
In portrait I found I was having a hard time anticipating upcoming turns and couldn't plan what lane would be best to avoid hitting a car. It's also a little tricky to modulate speed compared to having discrete buttons for forward vs turning.
In landscape I think the biggest challenge is how far your finger has to travel to make a quick turn from one side of the screen to the other. I also felt more comfortable using my pointer finger for the hand not holding my phone. So then even though I saw more of the screen, I was covering a lot with my hand.
I would get more intense lag spikes on mobile than I saw on desktop. It runs pretty smooth on mobile for the most part until about section 4 and then I'd notice a lot more lag. My phone is an S10 and I was running the game in Firefox mobile. On desktop I'm running Win 10 with a 1080 GPU and 6th gen i7 processor (not sure what stats you'd be interested in). I saw lag on both devices, but it recovered much faster on desktop than on mobile and wasn't really an issue. Not sure how much the lag impacts the challenge on mobile vs being trickier to control though.
Thanks, that's great stuff. Maybe I will switch to an on screen virtual game pad kind of thing for mobile with buttons for steering on left and gas/break on right. I can also look into lowering...
Thanks, that's great stuff. Maybe I will switch to an on screen virtual game pad kind of thing for mobile with buttons for steering on left and gas/break on right. I can also look into lowering the draw distance a bit and other culling optimizations to improve frame rate if a user is running on a mobile device. there are a few other things I can do to improve perf now that there's no 13k space limit.
I wondered about onscreen touch controls and I suspect they'd make a big difference. If you do add them and it's not too much extra work, it might be nice to be able to toggle which side of the...
I wondered about onscreen touch controls and I suspect they'd make a big difference. If you do add them and it's not too much extra work, it might be nice to be able to toggle which side of the screen the control is on depending on if you're left handed or right.
You could also consider a joy stick style control where you've got steering and acceleration in on spot. Hard to say which would be easier on a touch screen.
6:31.849 A near-perfect run. From a game perspective: that one unavoidable rock turn and extra-wide road-bush strips pains me. There's certain cycles of side-by-side cars that gatekeep during the...
6:31.849
A near-perfect run. From a game perspective: that one unavoidable rock turn and extra-wide road-bush strips pains me. There's certain cycles of side-by-side cars that gatekeep during the stages with fewer lanes, I would like to submit a request for a horn. If you're fast enough there's a triple rear-end'er in the mid stages which is cute that the AI vehicles interact with each other. Overall pretty fluid and got me to unconsciously switch to my Trackmania hand positioning.
Thanks that is great and astute feedback! So a couple things I'm planning... The whole jungle rock section is really nasty and needs a rework. I've managed some strategies to make it through but...
Thanks that is great and astute feedback! So a couple things I'm planning...
The whole jungle rock section is really nasty and needs a rework. I've managed some strategies to make it through but it's not ideal.
The vehicle traffic needs some work too as they seem to get too close to the car in front of them. I had some mostly working code that allowed cars to change lanes which would also be awesome especially if they have a turn signal so I want to get that working too. I think I could get the traffic sim working pretty nicely.
A horn yes! I will get that in soon. I cut a lot of sounds to make it fit in the 13k limit but I'm working on an improved version for the next phase of my plan which is releasing it on the Newgrounds website with achievements and shared scoreboard for fastest time. Thanks for the feedback!
Wow! This was wonderful. Thank you! I managed 6:38.949 on my first run. The second run was closer as I tried to experiment a little, 6:49.766. In fact, the timer that counts the seconds seems to...
Wow! This was wonderful. Thank you! I managed 6:38.949 on my first run. The second run was closer as I tried to experiment a little, 6:49.766.
In fact, the timer that counts the seconds seems to go to zero before the time actually runs out. Or am I just imagining things? I thought I ran out of time a couple of meters before the end there, but I still got through.
Anyway, I love how there is variety in the levels, always something a little different to pay attention to. That said, stage 8 with the rocks is a bit of a pain. The combination of the sudden difficulty spike (for me anyway), the somewhat out of place graphic for the rock (looks more pixelated than the rest of the game?) and the sound that you get when you bump into one, and of course the fact that you lose your flow, felt quite annoying. Even a bit unfair. But then again, it's also good to be annoyed in a game sometimes, and I felt good when I was through that stage.
Speaking of difficulty, I think the difficulty level could rank up a bit faster. The great thing about games like Out Run, Buggy Boy and others back in the day was that they were extremely well calibrated: if you made it through a level, you (or at least I) usually did so with the skin of your teeth, and that feeling was absolutely wonderful. Your heart was pounding when you saw the line that you needed to cross in the horizon, you looked at the clock and the line and the clock, and the line, and the clock, and pressed the joystick forward as hard as you could, not that it mattered. In your game, I usually have about 10-15 seconds left when the next level starts, so the experience is much more relaxing. Which might be good as well.
From a gameplay perspective, you don't have gear shifting or speed boost buttons or drifting or collectibles or alternate routes like some games did back in the day. And I don't expect them to be here, either. But I wonder if there could be an interesting game loop in there, if after a few stages, the complexity of controls would start to increase. Suddenly, you have the option to do a speed burst every now and then, and you need to time it correctly to get through the level. Then you have gears to deal with. Then you have a dog that demands drifting every now and then or it will bite you and you stop. And so on.
I've sometimes also thought that driving games like these would be a perfect candidate for a rogue-like or rogue-lite experience. During each run, you'd collect something, and that something would allow you to use a garage between runs to both fix your car (from the various crashes you made in the previous run) and to get new upgrades (maybe the speed burst button and the gears and the dog, etc.), making it possible for you to go further every run and explore more of the world.
But this is course just a browser game, so I don't expect any of that here.
And then again, this is "just" a browser game, and yet it looks so amazing and plays so well! Putting all that into 13 kb just blows my mind.
Yes the timer does go to 0 first, i tried it going to 1 and that did not feel good. I am 100% with you on the jungle rocks. I was really tight on time and space for the initial release to meet the...
Yes the timer does go to 0 first, i tried it going to 1 and that did not feel good.
I am 100% with you on the jungle rocks. I was really tight on time and space for the initial release to meet the competition deadline, but now rework some of these area. i also thought the collide sound may be a bit irritating, ill tweak that too.
Eventually I will be adding more gameplay mechanics, speed boots, turbos, etc. I have set up gearing systems for car sims before, just takes time and tweaking and it will add a lot to the subtle feel of acceleration. The engine sound will also be improved, i had to do it a crappy way to save space. I will try to get in that dog for you!
I am down with the "carpg" concept and am thinking along the same lines. After I finish polishing this demo, the next step is building out a metagame so it has a persistent career, upgrades, etc.
Thanks so much for your great feedback. I'm thinking about putting it on steam sometimes next year, maybe it will be more then just a browser game someday. ;)
Something other games do is when the timer reaches 0, the car starts slowing, and when it stops you lose. But if you pass a checkpoint before the car fully stops, you continue.
Something other games do is when the timer reaches 0, the car starts slowing, and when it stops you lose. But if you pass a checkpoint before the car fully stops, you continue.
I'll try it but generally my rule is to lean on giving players the benefit of the doubt, so in this case that means after the timer goes 0 you still have a full second left. Though there is an...
I'll try it but generally my rule is to lean on giving players the benefit of the doubt, so in this case that means after the timer goes 0 you still have a full second left. Though there is an edge case where the timer can run out, the engine cuts out, but then the car is close enough to roll through a checkpoint. that happened to me once in testing, i could make that grace period longer.
Really well done! It's Insane to me that it is only 13kb. Very impressive.The billboards on the side were a nice touch that made me smile a few times. I have only tried it on mobile but still had...
Really well done! It's Insane to me that it is only 13kb. Very impressive.The billboards on the side were a nice touch that made me smile a few times. I have only tried it on mobile but still had a good time. In portrait mode with one hand, I found it a bit difficult to anticipate turns. I need to try it in landscape and on a bigger screen. I saw you mentioned in another comment about a potential virtual joystick and gas button. I think that's a good suggestion but would be nice if it's also an option to keep one handed play possible.
Thanks so much! I continue to make updates, definitely will be switching to the virtual gamepad soon, I have all the code in another game, just need to bring it over.
Thanks so much! I continue to make updates, definitely will be switching to the virtual gamepad soon, I have all the code in another game, just need to bring it over.
Today I am excited to share my new game Dr1v3n Wild, which is a 13k driving game inspired by OutRun. The entire game, graphics, code, art, sound, etc fits in a 13 kilobyte zip file. The code is also opensource. This build is identical to the 13K version with extra support for touch and gamepads. It should run nicely on pretty my any modern device. Enjoy!
This was made for the JS13k competition, you can see my entry's official page here...
https://js13kgames.com/2024/games/dr1v3n-wild
Awesome contribution!!! I ended up getting to stage 10 before running out of time. Definitely hits of nostalgia and a very accessible game for anyone to jump into!
Thanks, that's my thought too. I've made many games but this one seems like it may be the most accessible and playable by the widest range of audience. It sounds like I have difficulty tuned pretty well then, that is near the end. I hope you manage to finish in your next run.
Another KilledByAPixel game!
I adore your work. You are ridiculously talented.
Thank you so much, always feels good to share here.
Phenomenal work as always. Congrats!
thank you.
I'm impressed at how nicely this runs (and how nice it feels) on mobile. Great work!
Thanks so much, i too was surprised at how well it runs on mobile. Definitely thinking about reworking it for release on the app store.
Very nice! As a kid, my brother and I sunk a lot of time into 8-bit driving games with worse graphics, and I played a fair bit of Outrun in the arcade. :-)
The main thing I'm missing compared to Outrun is the soundtrack, but you could play it separately.
Thanks, I was also a big fan of Outrun, and also Road Rash which considered making instead of this. Maybe nest year. I wanted so bad to include a sound track that had the ui for a radio and 3 buttons set up but cut all that and music to save space and time.
Wow this is amazing. I kept getting surprised by the differences in the levels. I look forward to checking out the source code.
I did a lot better once I figured out you don't have to use the mouse. Also found some undocumented things while I was trying every key on the keyboard :)
I was able to win after a few tries. Very fun.
Thank you, I packed a lot of stuff into this code and I think its pretty interesting to check out. Thanks for playing!
This was great! Reminded me of those racing arcade games in the 90s as a kid. Which maybe these still exist? Idk.
Either way, I got to Stage 8! Why are there rocks in the road? Where is the local DoT??
Stage 8 is the jungle, that is like an offroad vibe with no other cars. If you get past that there are no more rocks in the road and stage 10 is the final one.
Nice game, not sure why you had to put a political sign in it, though.
I don't have money to donate and I don't want to volunteer but when something is important to me I try to say something about it. Hopefully it is not too heavy handed in this game.
I thought it was cute, and it made me smile, fwiw.
This is very fun to play, thank you so much for sharing!
thanks for playing!
I'm not sure it's possible to beat on mobile, at least on my phone. But I pulled it up on my desktop and was able to play all the way through with a time of 6:46.516, feel like I can definitely beat that time though. Reminds me a lot of a few browser flash games I really like and played as a kid!
Nice, thanks for playing! Was it running slow on your phone, or just difficult to control with touch? I honestly have not beaten it on mobile either, I will give it a shot tomorrow.
In portrait I found I was having a hard time anticipating upcoming turns and couldn't plan what lane would be best to avoid hitting a car. It's also a little tricky to modulate speed compared to having discrete buttons for forward vs turning.
In landscape I think the biggest challenge is how far your finger has to travel to make a quick turn from one side of the screen to the other. I also felt more comfortable using my pointer finger for the hand not holding my phone. So then even though I saw more of the screen, I was covering a lot with my hand.
I would get more intense lag spikes on mobile than I saw on desktop. It runs pretty smooth on mobile for the most part until about section 4 and then I'd notice a lot more lag. My phone is an S10 and I was running the game in Firefox mobile. On desktop I'm running Win 10 with a 1080 GPU and 6th gen i7 processor (not sure what stats you'd be interested in). I saw lag on both devices, but it recovered much faster on desktop than on mobile and wasn't really an issue. Not sure how much the lag impacts the challenge on mobile vs being trickier to control though.
Thanks, that's great stuff. Maybe I will switch to an on screen virtual game pad kind of thing for mobile with buttons for steering on left and gas/break on right. I can also look into lowering the draw distance a bit and other culling optimizations to improve frame rate if a user is running on a mobile device. there are a few other things I can do to improve perf now that there's no 13k space limit.
I wondered about onscreen touch controls and I suspect they'd make a big difference. If you do add them and it's not too much extra work, it might be nice to be able to toggle which side of the screen the control is on depending on if you're left handed or right.
You could also consider a joy stick style control where you've got steering and acceleration in on spot. Hard to say which would be easier on a touch screen.
6:31.849
A near-perfect run. From a game perspective: that one unavoidable rock turn and extra-wide road-bush strips pains me. There's certain cycles of side-by-side cars that gatekeep during the stages with fewer lanes, I would like to submit a request for a horn. If you're fast enough there's a triple rear-end'er in the mid stages which is cute that the AI vehicles interact with each other. Overall pretty fluid and got me to unconsciously switch to my Trackmania hand positioning.
Thanks that is great and astute feedback! So a couple things I'm planning...
The whole jungle rock section is really nasty and needs a rework. I've managed some strategies to make it through but it's not ideal.
The vehicle traffic needs some work too as they seem to get too close to the car in front of them. I had some mostly working code that allowed cars to change lanes which would also be awesome especially if they have a turn signal so I want to get that working too. I think I could get the traffic sim working pretty nicely.
A horn yes! I will get that in soon. I cut a lot of sounds to make it fit in the 13k limit but I'm working on an improved version for the next phase of my plan which is releasing it on the Newgrounds website with achievements and shared scoreboard for fastest time. Thanks for the feedback!
3:30!
for real? major congrats so, must have been a damn near prefect run!
I didn't finish! That's how long I lasted before I died :P
Haha, that's about halfway through, a full run is around 6 minutes.
Wow! This was wonderful. Thank you! I managed 6:38.949 on my first run. The second run was closer as I tried to experiment a little, 6:49.766.
In fact, the timer that counts the seconds seems to go to zero before the time actually runs out. Or am I just imagining things? I thought I ran out of time a couple of meters before the end there, but I still got through.
Anyway, I love how there is variety in the levels, always something a little different to pay attention to. That said, stage 8 with the rocks is a bit of a pain. The combination of the sudden difficulty spike (for me anyway), the somewhat out of place graphic for the rock (looks more pixelated than the rest of the game?) and the sound that you get when you bump into one, and of course the fact that you lose your flow, felt quite annoying. Even a bit unfair. But then again, it's also good to be annoyed in a game sometimes, and I felt good when I was through that stage.
Speaking of difficulty, I think the difficulty level could rank up a bit faster. The great thing about games like Out Run, Buggy Boy and others back in the day was that they were extremely well calibrated: if you made it through a level, you (or at least I) usually did so with the skin of your teeth, and that feeling was absolutely wonderful. Your heart was pounding when you saw the line that you needed to cross in the horizon, you looked at the clock and the line and the clock, and the line, and the clock, and pressed the joystick forward as hard as you could, not that it mattered. In your game, I usually have about 10-15 seconds left when the next level starts, so the experience is much more relaxing. Which might be good as well.
From a gameplay perspective, you don't have gear shifting or speed boost buttons or drifting or collectibles or alternate routes like some games did back in the day. And I don't expect them to be here, either. But I wonder if there could be an interesting game loop in there, if after a few stages, the complexity of controls would start to increase. Suddenly, you have the option to do a speed burst every now and then, and you need to time it correctly to get through the level. Then you have gears to deal with. Then you have a dog that demands drifting every now and then or it will bite you and you stop. And so on.
I've sometimes also thought that driving games like these would be a perfect candidate for a rogue-like or rogue-lite experience. During each run, you'd collect something, and that something would allow you to use a garage between runs to both fix your car (from the various crashes you made in the previous run) and to get new upgrades (maybe the speed burst button and the gears and the dog, etc.), making it possible for you to go further every run and explore more of the world.
But this is course just a browser game, so I don't expect any of that here.
And then again, this is "just" a browser game, and yet it looks so amazing and plays so well! Putting all that into 13 kb just blows my mind.
Thank you for sharing!
Yes the timer does go to 0 first, i tried it going to 1 and that did not feel good.
I am 100% with you on the jungle rocks. I was really tight on time and space for the initial release to meet the competition deadline, but now rework some of these area. i also thought the collide sound may be a bit irritating, ill tweak that too.
Eventually I will be adding more gameplay mechanics, speed boots, turbos, etc. I have set up gearing systems for car sims before, just takes time and tweaking and it will add a lot to the subtle feel of acceleration. The engine sound will also be improved, i had to do it a crappy way to save space. I will try to get in that dog for you!
I am down with the "carpg" concept and am thinking along the same lines. After I finish polishing this demo, the next step is building out a metagame so it has a persistent career, upgrades, etc.
Thanks so much for your great feedback. I'm thinking about putting it on steam sometimes next year, maybe it will be more then just a browser game someday. ;)
Something other games do is when the timer reaches 0, the car starts slowing, and when it stops you lose. But if you pass a checkpoint before the car fully stops, you continue.
I'll try it but generally my rule is to lean on giving players the benefit of the doubt, so in this case that means after the timer goes 0 you still have a full second left. Though there is an edge case where the timer can run out, the engine cuts out, but then the car is close enough to roll through a checkpoint. that happened to me once in testing, i could make that grace period longer.
Really well done! It's Insane to me that it is only 13kb. Very impressive.The billboards on the side were a nice touch that made me smile a few times. I have only tried it on mobile but still had a good time. In portrait mode with one hand, I found it a bit difficult to anticipate turns. I need to try it in landscape and on a bigger screen. I saw you mentioned in another comment about a potential virtual joystick and gas button. I think that's a good suggestion but would be nice if it's also an option to keep one handed play possible.
Keep us updated.
Thanks so much! I continue to make updates, definitely will be switching to the virtual gamepad soon, I have all the code in another game, just need to bring it over.