Afterglow is a synthwave arcade racer, drift mechanics, fill a boost meter, knock rivals into walls, and race a boss at the end of each world which becomes slightly more challenging.
I have good coding/design knowledge to begin with, but Claude helped me make this relatively fast compared to if I did this by hand.
Controls: WASD or arrows, Space to drift, Shift to boost.
Things I already know about:
• Mobile is iffy, try it tell me if it works for you, it’s a hold type of control setup, you hold left for left and you hold right for right.
• A few minor graphics glitches
• No gamepad yet
What I’d like to know:
Does the driving feel good? Too easy, too slippery, too stiff?Is it fun?
Should I pursue this further? These are the things I am planning on doing. Make it into an actual app for desktop/mobile, flesh out campaign further (more worlds, an actual story, multiplayer, upgrade systems.
Anything I should know? Constructive criticism is always welcome.
Ok so I have to say the execution here is mad good!
It almost makes me want to stop my current effort (which is somewhat related, but not identical, and done the old-school way, sans AI).
There have been quite a few entries recently in the driving niche, all AI aided, or straight-up vibe-coded. The latest models are impossible to discount. I feel sick admitting this
Thank you sooo much! I am a professional designer by trade, so 3D, editing, level design, creativity that’s me. AI has been mainly used to code and get the physics right, so that it is fun to drive. Without AI would be a tedious process, to get down manually, the cool thing is this would have taken a team of people two-three years ago, now I can solo it!
Thank you very much, my suggestion is do not torture yourself by writing code yourself, use that saved time to be creative and think outside the box, let me know if this was unsolicited advice.
Great game! I really like the drift + boost gameplay, it makes the races feel very dynamic. A few things: I got stuck at the “SIT BEHIND ECHO” step of the tutorial, it wasn’t clear to me what I had to do. And the races felt a bit too easy, the bots could be tougher.
my suggestion is do not torture yourself by writing code yourself, use that saved time to be creative and think outside the box
Writing code is the easy part, which takes the least of time.
Software architecture, problem solving, novel optimisations, and creative choices - to name a few - is the hard part, that pseudo-AI can’t help reliably, and definitely not to make a difference.
