Tailwind by synthetic-entropy
Tailwind is a top down racing game in which you play as a seed spirit riding a leaf through various areas to replant the barren areas. Your goal is to go as quickly as possible so you can bring life to the next area.
The controls are simple - just move left and right. If you try to go the opposite direction while turning, you'll slide your leaf along the ground, pulling nutrients from the soil. This charges your leaf, which will fly on the wind with tremendous speed when you release at least one button.
Since you're trying to hurry, you just spread seeds behind you wherever you go. In retrospect, this wasn't the best idea - now you're running into the plants you've already planted the last time you went through here, and running into them slows you down, so try to avoid them. They grow bigger over time, and the bigger they are, the more caught up in them you become.
## Playing the game
To play from source, clone the repository and install love2d.org 0.9.2 for your system. On Windows, you can drag the folder onto `love.exe` to run it, or you can change into the cloned directory in a terminal and run `love .`
You can also check the releases for the latest release, we try to build for all available systems.
There are a number of control mappings to the two buttons:
- Left and right arrow keys
- Left and right control
- Left and right shift
- A and D
- H and L
- B and F
## Credits
- zeta0134 - engine programming, sound editing
- cromo - menu programming, art, sound effects
- rgarza533 - music, sound effects
- robertoszek - testing
- gboblyn - testing
The controls are simple - just move left and right. If you try to go the opposite direction while turning, you'll slide your leaf along the ground, pulling nutrients from the soil. This charges your leaf, which will fly on the wind with tremendous speed when you release at least one button.
Since you're trying to hurry, you just spread seeds behind you wherever you go. In retrospect, this wasn't the best idea - now you're running into the plants you've already planted the last time you went through here, and running into them slows you down, so try to avoid them. They grow bigger over time, and the bigger they are, the more caught up in them you become.
## Playing the game
To play from source, clone the repository and install love2d.org 0.9.2 for your system. On Windows, you can drag the folder onto `love.exe` to run it, or you can change into the cloned directory in a terminal and run `love .`
You can also check the releases for the latest release, we try to build for all available systems.
There are a number of control mappings to the two buttons:
- Left and right arrow keys
- Left and right control
- Left and right shift
- A and D
- H and L
- B and F
## Credits
- zeta0134 - engine programming, sound editing
- cromo - menu programming, art, sound effects
- rgarza533 - music, sound effects
- robertoszek - testing
- gboblyn - testing
Ratings
| Coolness | 64% | 3 |
| Overall(Jam) | 3.55 | 292 |
| Fun(Jam) | 3.21 | 464 |
| Graphics(Jam) | 3.36 | 560 |
| Innovation(Jam) | 3.12 | 532 |
| Theme(Jam) | 3.64 | 541 |
Consider multiplayer! This game would be a lot of fun to race my friends on!
Respawning could be handled a little better.
Great job!
10/10 would play again.
One thing that I found annoying was that I would often crash into the wall and then I would crash several more times while trying to get out of it. I think reorienting the player after a crash would be helpful
- art: thank you for all the kind words. I'm really happy with how it turned out. I'm not especially artistic and I had no idea what style to go with when I started. It just kinda popped into existence and I went with it. You can even tell which pieces were done earlier on because they have sharp corners - I moved to rounded corners on everything once I got a feel for it.
- drifting: I'm really happy with how this came out. The physics of the game went through roughly three iterations over the course of the jam, with the last one feeling the best.
- theme: I feel the mixed themes made this game what it is. And yes, the idea behind growing plants on the track was to encourage players to take a slightly different route each time and plan ahead.
- map length: I agree, the maps are on the short side. I restricted the maps to 2048 pixel squares because we load the whole map into a single texture, because we don't know what sizes other people's computers can handle. Love guarantees at least 1024 (though our computers support 16384). On our to do list was to implement stitching multiple textures together to allow for larger levels, but we focused out efforts on polishing the maps we had already done.
- phone version: this is definitely something we want to do! In fact, it was discussed shortly after deciding on the concept, but we had already selected love for familiarity, which doesn't have phone support, and the ports of it that exist are incomplete.
- performance issues: that's rather unfortunate. We never ran into issues on our systems, which are pretty beefy. We didn't do any optimization whatsoever. In particular, all plants are drawn every frame.
- multiplayer: absolutely! This was on our feature wish list, but unfortunately some early design decisions prevented us from being able to add it in the limited time. I want to add this in the future. In lieu of multiplayer, we also considered AI racers and time trial ghosts.
- bad respawns: this is really the worst part of the game as it is now, in my opinion. We had a slightly more sophisticated system in place, but it would occasionally put you out of bounds, getting the player stuck in an infinite respawn loop. Adjusting the rotation some depending on the direction the player was going would be a simple solution. Sadly, because I was cramming the map within our size limit, some of the borders - especially around the edges - are way too small.
The gameplay is quite intriguing, too. The maps are interesting and the graphics simple and effective. Only the music seems a little unfitting for a rather "happy" game like this one.
Otherwise, not much to criticize, awesome job, thanks for the game!
Like said before, multiplayer could be cool. Maybe racing against other people's ghosts (asynchronous multiplayer), so you wouldn't have to worry about realtime netcode.