Inspired by Braid
Part of being a game developer is the chore of playing other games to find inspiration and ideas. The much-hyped (for an indie game) Braid was recently released for Windows, and I just had to try it. Did that, and bought it immediately. It's a brilliant game and you should all try out the demo at least.
So what has this got to do with Mad Skills Motocross, you ask? Stop playing around and get that game finished already you lazy bum, you say.
I agree. However, I did get an idea from Braid. It has been done before, but this got me thinking about it. In Braid, you can play the next level even if you didn't manage to complete the previous. The mere action of playing a level unlocks the next one, so you are forced to try the levels in order, but not to complete them in order.
Frankly, Braid would have been unplayable without this particular feature of its meta-structure. The puzzles are really intelligently constructed, but you still get frustrated sometimes when you can't complete them. All you need to do is continue playing and bend your mind around a few other puzzles, and then go back and complete the unfinished ones.
Invaluable, because otherwise I would have shut down the game when I got frustrated. Most likely I would have returned to it later to bang my head against that particular puzzle again, but it is so much more fun to keep playing other levels than to stop playing.
So that's how we are going to do it in Mad Skills Motocross, I believe. When you play the first race the second race is unlocked, and so on. But to continue to the next division, you have to win all races in the current division. So when you get stuck, just play the next race to improve your skills.
What do you all think of this? Sounds like a good idea? We'd love to hear your feedback in the forums or by mail.
Timestepping
Hi, this is my first dev diary entry even though I've been working at Turborilla for a while now. I plan to make more frequent posts in the future and tell you about what I'm doing and get some thoughts on programming out there. Currently I'm working on a half-secret project so I can't say much about that just yet.
However, if you're a games programmer you might find this interesting. I've wanted to write that article for quite some time and now I finally got around to do it. It's been bugging me that no other article on timestepping talks enough about vertical synchronization.
Read our Timestepping Article
In shot it says that you should use a fixed time step and strive to enable vsync. Then it explains what you should think about when making your timestepping algorithm based on that goal. It covers the problem when vsync rate is different from the targeted framerate and the likely superflousness, lag and unevenness (frame time variation) of interpolated draws.
Don't worry if you didn't understand the paragraph above. The non-programmer version goes like this: It makes your game run smoother.
Backflip Bonanza
A commenter on newgrounds had this to said after watching the trailers:
looks like every other motocross game where you can lean forward and backwards but never quite pull off a flip
So I had to make this video to shut him up:
Time Attack
Right now we are working on the Time Attack mode. In this mode you can race against yourself, at least against your previously best time. This is the shit, It really is, it's just so much fun trying to shave a few tenths of a second from your previous time. "But what if I activate the nitro before instead of after that jump over there? Let's try it."
Oh, regarding the nitro. In an earlier diary entry I said that nitro doesn't add anything to the gameplay because it's all about skill. Well, it turns out that now that we have one Arcade mode and one Simulation mode, we can happily add all sorts of crazy power-ups to Arcade and still keep Simulation intact for the purists. This was really the best solution I think, since the testers said that the game is crazy fun but will get a bit boring without new stuff coming up all the time.
So now we have the Jumparoo, Nitro, Glider and Jetpack. They are all great fun, and more or less useful. I think we need one more, because they are so much fun thinking up. We have had some great brainstorming sessions over here 
How to get a free beta
We have decided to release a free beta version of Mad Skills Motocross. There is a catch though, we won't release it until we have 1001 fans on our Facebook fan page.
So if you want to get the beta version of Mad Skills Motocross when we reach the magic number of fans, just go to the fan page and become a fan. It is very important that you actually become a fan, otherwise we cannot contact you to give you the secret download link. Hurry up, things can happen quickly on Facebook.
On that page we have also uploaded concept art, screenshots and videos. To check them out, just go there. You don't even need a Facebook user to access the page.
Vimeo doesn’t like games
Apparently, Vimeo (where we hosted our latest trailer) doesn't like games. We received an email today saying that our video was removed because it violated their upload rules.
Vimeo does not allow game walk-throughs, game strategy videos, depictions of player vs player battles, raids, or any other video gaming video that simply depicts individuals playing a video game.
I don't know why they do that, but it also happened to Wolfire.
A particle system for jME
The Turborilla Developer Diary will now be in the format of a regular blog. The lenghty articles that where its past format did not work out so good, months without updates because we felt we had to write long articles. So from now on, this is a blog. Which means more frequent updates, but not so big. Okay, let's get on with what we really had to say:
As described here: Divisions and Tracks, we have been working on getting the JOPS particle system displaying in the jME 3D graphics engine to be able to make nice special effects.
Here's a lengthy video showing what you can do with particle systems:
We are now ready to release the first version of JopsMonkey, and while it is only for jME 1.0 at the moment we hope the community will port it to jME 2.0. That should be no problem.
In the trailer of Mad Skills Motocross below you can see it in action, the nitro-flame has been made in the JOPS editor and is displayed in the game via JopsMonkey. We also use it for lots of other effects, like when you win a race it sprays confetti on you.
For instructions on how to set it up, read here: JopsMonkey
October -08 : Distractions
Not much has happened development-wise, but a lot in other areas. Turborilla has hired! Read all about it here 
July -08: Divisions and Tracks
The main game mode of Mad Skills Motocross is the career mode, but what does that mean? This and much more in July's Turborilla Developer Diary.
read more...
April -08 : The Test Results Are In
The testers have given their verdict on the first alpha version of Mad Skills Motocross.
