Current Events > I just had an interesting game idea.

(+) Yeah! (+)

I was going down the YouTube rabbit hole, as I often do, and came across a video of a guy playing Star Citizen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wp6F3IAdB0

The dude's piloting skills are obviously pretty insane. But it gave me an idea. What about an airplane/starship racing game where the gimmick is that your engine has a limiter and the closer to the ground you fly the faster the top speed you're allowed to reach? I think it could make for some pretty interesting high-level competitions, managing how much risk you're willing to take in order to catch up, or how safe you can fly without losing your advantage.

And let's face it, there would be some fucking EPIC speedruns.

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Bump

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nifty idea on paper.

my one issue is that racing is typically about finding the fastest line through a course anyway. i wonder if this might have the opposite effect, where instead of providing a catch-up mechanic, it makes it harder to ever catch up.
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Stealing

sLaCkEr408___RJ posted...

Stealing

Go for it. I don't have the technical know-how to make it myself, and I don't have the connections to pitch it to anybody who could.

Just throw me a shout-out during the credits, yeah?

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Pancake posted...

my one issue is that racing is typically about finding the fastest line through a course anyway. i wonder if this might have the opposite effect, where instead of providing a catch-up mechanic, it makes it harder to ever catch up.

I mean...not really? In real racing you still see leaders taking safer lines that are slightly slower because they can afford the extra time and don't want to risk crashing out and not even finishing. People don't push right to the razor's edge of possibility every single lap of every single race just because that's "the best line." Reality is that nobody's perfect, everyone makes mistakes, and so if they always go for that optimal line they will occasionally push just a hair too far or misjudge their position by a fraction and it costs them everything.

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I'm also envisioning very large, open courses with minimal small checkpoints to go through along the way. You could play it safe, fly high and go in a perfectly straight line. Or you could go hot-shot and start ducking and weaving a few feet off the ground through tight canyons so you can achieve ludicrous speeds.

There might also be a mechanic where you can go super low to gain speed and then pull up out of a canyon and sort of "coast" to carry some of that momentum in a safer, more direct path. Your engine couldn't continue thrusting at 5000mph, but if you're going 5000mph and you cut your engines you don't just instantly drop to a standstill, after all. It could come down to optimizing where you can confidently dip down low to gain that speed and which areas of the course you should use that speed to skip over the top of, etc.

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