New Cafe

There is a new website called Patisserie Cyclisme which combines cycling and the even more important cafes and cakes. The site already features many cafe reviews, and even allows you to upload your own cafe review, thus providing an ever growing database of cycling friendly cafes. This is a great idea.

This inspired me to create the cafe for real in the game :) I've therefore updated my buildings tile-set to include a new cafe called "Patisserie Cyclisme".

The Patisserie Cyclisme logo was used with permission from the owners.

Stone Bridge

I've created a little stone bridge from tiles. Again, the bridge is made from two layers of tiles, creating a 'foreground' and 'background' element allowing the cyclist to appear to be riding between those layers. The system that I use to define a path for the cyclists allows me to easily add the hump for the bridge. It looks great when the peloton rides over it.

I might experiment with using rivers or waterfalls as natural breaks in the scenery. This might get around the problem of how to blend urban to rural and make it look convincing.

Windmill

I had a bit of a late night so I could tinker with the game. I'm still focusing on the environment, and I wanted to create more movement as it feels very dead at the moment. The cliche windmill. Very simple to program. Each instance of the windmill has a random rotation speed for the blades so no two are the same.

Mountain top Chalet

More work done on the housing last night. This time a mountain top Chalet. "Afro-boy takes to the descent with hair-a-wobbling".

That's just reminded me, all riders will have a flapping/wobbling animation triggered on the descents. I tried it without, and it was clear it just didn't feel thrilling enough.

French Town Buildings

I want the stages in the races to feel like they are travelling through a landscape; through towns and out through rural areas. I've now turned to creating more tile-sets, this time for the town areas. I'll create simple block housing, and look into creating distant housing to give a nice dense feel to the town. Should create a nice parallax effect too.

Currently, the landscape has a French flavour.