Caddie Racer (old versions)
Caddie Racer is a kinetic racer where you ride a shopping cart. There are only two buttons : Left and Right.
It’s kind of a passion project that has gone through many iterations as I try to get my shit together. I’ll try to document the past versions here.
2017: Caddie Racer “Prototype”
Windows download, Linux download
This was made when I was in 1st year of university, using Unity. This resulted from a “why is there no shopping cart racing game ?” discussion after going to the supermarket with my roommates, which left me wondering about what the control scheme would even look like. I immediately thought of controling it with 2 buttons which would make the cart rotate in each direction, and move forward if alternated.
This led me to developping this, and I experimented a lot with the controls, I figured that constant push values feel really bad to play. For example if spam the same direction to make your cart rotate, maybe the rotation induced should be higher. And if you spam the opposition direction to the one you’re currently rotation, you probably want to counterract this current rotation (and so it should help you to do so).
The cart rotation in 3D space caused a lot of trouble, especially in the air when it is falling. I think it’s very apparent if you manage to climb the 90° slopes and get in the air, your cart will have a very wonky behaviour.
The input handling reuses some C# class I made in anticipation for a fighting game, I thought it would be useful to be able to retrieve the last N inputs (I ended up just incrementing some counters which is much easier). This explains the input sequence in the top-right corner of the screen… The button overlay on the right is inspired by osu!.
2019-2020: Caddie Racer “V2”
After a lot of struggle moving from Unity, I managed to start over in Godot 3. I had a lot of trouble managing the networking and the game physics, it was much harder than with Unity.
The gameplay is very easy and spammy. You reach the top speed very quickly, turn very well, and have little trouble managing angular inertia. This result in “pretty easy” good plays, you can see in the video I can make the cart go everywhere I want it to go and take shortcuts pretty easily.
2021-2022 Caddie Racer “V3”
2022 version, with a cool interface (waste of time) and a multiplayer mode. The gameplay is kinda a middlepoint between the 2017 and 2020 version.