looper by Matt Swieboda
Stay on the tracks, or game over!
WASD or arrow keys to accelerate and turn
Hold any SHIFT to drift
In menus: WS/arrow and Enter/Space to select, Esc/Backspace to go back or exit
Still very much WIP but it's my first Ludum Dare, just happy to be able to submit something!
I'm coding in crystal using raylib bindings to crystal via cray (also game a WIP OOP wrapper)
Art in aseprite, sound WIP but probably with jsfxr
MacOS only right now and no browser support, sorry! Here’s some gameplay since most can’t play (sorry again)

If I have time I'll try Linux builds, and then Win via WSL.
Crystal may not have been the best cross-platform choice but I love programming in it :D
| Youtube | https://github.com/mswieboda/looper |
| Youtube | https://github.com/mswieboda/looper/releases/download/v0.1.5/looper.app.zip |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/looper |
Ratings
| Graphics | 1440th | 2.5⭐ | 18🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 13🗳️ | 13🗨️ |
For the time being, I just can't rate this.
Otherwise not bad, it works and it's solid for a first Ludum Dare.
I found it really difficult, and I feel it should be difficult, because the entire game is driving around in a circle. But it wasn't a very fun difficult.
I would start by juicing the hell out of it, skid marks, particles, screenshake etc. The point of the juice should primarily be to help communicate to the player how the game is responding to their inputs. When I am on the grass, then the car is bumpy. If the handling is starting to lose control, then you see skid marks etc. And I would iterate on the driving until it feels really really good.
Then you'll want to something in there to ensure the user takes risk. A lap time limit would be the obvious way. Without that there is no incentive to take risk (drive fast, which is fun). And the user will follow the degenerate strategy of taking their time (which is less fun).
One last note: I always write down honest review, because everybody need that, not just nice craps with some bullshit, but sometime I will aperceite very good games. So if this review insult you, but use it well :) Anyway every game is counting so :)
Unfortunately it's really super friggin' difficult :smile: I honestly could finish one loop after quite a lot of retries, I didn't understand why I lost almost immediately when I ran off the road.
Instead of fighting the controls, a more fun take could be to try and find the right driving lines to optimise the time. Like mentioned by @waynetron above, timer would make this quite different (and very likely better). Now your high-score is only metered by your patience to drive slow enough.
It's really a good idea to use a language that most users can run, a web build is best, since it doesn't require installing anything. Can't say much about crystal (as this is actually the first time I heard about it), but good choices could be Phaser (for javascript/typescript) or maybe HaxeFlixel (with haxe).