0.2.0 Freestyle Tricks, Manuals, and Leaning

Hey VMXers, 

The long-awaited June update in July. In this section of our roadmap, our goal was to make the game feel a lot more dynamic. We were not able to hit everything in our roadmap, but we think this offers a lot of depth to what exists currently in the game.

Manuals, Wheelies, Nose Manual

This has been one of the most requested features. The player is now able to pull their bike towards them or away to do manual tricks. An indicator shows up where you can see the current status of your manual. You will be able to chain these together with other tricks by starting them in the air or bunny hopping from them.

Leaning

One complaint we have often received is that the bike feels stiff and arcadey. It is an arcade game, to be blunt, but we've improved this feeling by introducing lean turning. Based on how much you tilt your handlebar, your bike will adjust with you. This effect is scaled on your speed as well. Better yet, it works with the manuals. You can also use it in the air to tabletop.

Freestyle tricks

We set out to make overhead tricks for scooters in this update. Our old tailwhip was a gesture that detected circles, which just played an animation. We've now added a physics model to the bike frame/scooter deck so you can move your hands around in any direction, and the frame/deck react more naturally. We've rebuilt the tailwhip to work in this system, which will take a little bit of unlearning old muscle memory, but it feels way more natural. Overhead tricks will now be possible.

There's a few other nice-to-haves: we fixed some annoying bike-spawning issues, and you can turn the handlebar fully around now on the ground.

What is missing

Grinding

We do have a working grinding model in our developer environment. The problem is our collision detection model makes it way too challenging to reliably get onto the grinds. We need to improve this first before we can push out grinding.

Scoring

We mentioned overheads, manuals, and tabletops. These are not tied into the scoring system yet. But tailwhip is, because that existed already in the game and we didn’t want to take away anything else. This was a time-related issue.

Tucks

This was another trick we wanted to get to. We realized it depended on the freestyle system being in place. This materialized late in the process, so it had to be skipped.

We've discussed this on our Discord a bit further, but I'll give you the short version here. This is a code update, and we have a single coder on this project. We gave ourselves a tight deadline to do a lot, and we weren't able to get everything we promised on the roadmap because we underbudgeted our time. We decided to keep moving forward because what we do have is an improvement. The other items on our roadmap are still necessary to make the game more replayable. Most importantly, the best thing for our social multiplayer game is hitting our timeline for getting the meta version out so there are more players with crossplay. This does not mean we are completely abandoning these features; we'll come back to them at a later date. We think this is an improvement over what already exists. We hope you understand. Let us know how we did, and how we can do better.

Thanks,

Break Free Interactive

Full Patch notes:

Features:

• Added Freestyle Mode

• Added Manual / Nose manual mechanics

• Added a leaning mechanic, which affects turning and bike rotation.

• Added in air leaning, allowing for table tops.

• Added new tutorials for Manuals and leaning

• Added new tutorials for Calibration and Motion sickness settings

Changes:

• Handlebar can be completely rotated while on the ground (previously was clamped to about 80 degrees from forward)

• Reworked networking stack to handle new tricks / player adjustments

• Improved player offsets and IK so bike offsets are more natural.

• Added Bullet points in tutorial to help separate lines

• Updated player riding tutorial to indicate you can reverse

• Redid nametags to be a bit more visible

• Minor performance improvements

Fixed:

• Sometimes bike would not spawn

• Fixed issue where pedal sounds don't play backwards

• Fixed Issue where bike would flip over when respawned when crashing sideways