Metropolitian Drag Racing: A top-down retro racing game

[Sedgwick2K]

Here is the project I'm lately talking about, the Metropolitian Drag Racing.

Inspired from Street Rod, this top down racing game includes extensive tuning (engine swaps, turbocharging etc.), a long operation of "burning asphalts, taking stakes and winning races", gaining prestige and friends and eventually being the ultimate street racer in the town.
The game sets in 1972, in a still unnamed town, you're a young car guy who got money to buy a car; but you also envy a person called Fish, who is appearently son of mayor and also the bully of your high school. You decide to canalyze your envy into your love towards cars and join to street racing scheme.

As of now; the game contains 28 cars, with 9 of them are perfectly playable, with ability of upgrading them, looking at your statistics and prestige (both you and your car has prestige) and pull up in a long street race with your opponents, which gradually gets better and more tuned cars. Many aspects of game are still incomplete; like gaining friends (you are supposed to get up to 5 close friends in this game), improving ability to maintain the car according to levels gained by prestige (each car starts from level 0 and goes up to level 3) and even INVESTING YOUR IN-GAME MONEY (this is actually a mock-up to microtransactions).

Other than that, I plan a few little things to improve gameplay; like light-to-light and pink slip races.

Here's a small tease from game's garage screen:

If you have any ideas and suggestions, write down to comments, I'll try to make them count.

 

[AveCoo]

Very cool! The graphics are very pleasant and give me some mild old-school Atari style vibes. Perhaps you could try and shave off some of the edges on the car to give it some more shape, however? It's looking quite literally box-y at the moment, and it might help in distinguishing the front from the back more easily I also imagine it would be quite a hurdle making drag racing mechanically interesting as it's generally in a straight line (correct me if I'm wrong), so the idea of stats and prestige sounds like an awesome one to keeping it interesting and fun. I'm super keen to see how that all works! It's also nice to hear you've got your motivations and story underway too... Is Fish going to act as an antagonist throughout the game? I really hope he's unlikable so the act of kicking his butt is extra enjoyable!!

 

[Sedgwick2K]

Very cool! The graphics are very pleasant and give me some mild old-school Atari style vibes. Perhaps you could try and shave off some of the edges on the car to give it some more shape, however? It's looking quite literally box-y at the moment, and it might help in distinguishing the front from the back more easily I also imagine it would be quite a hurdle making drag racing mechanically interesting as it's generally in a straight line (correct me if I'm wrong), so the idea of stats and prestige sounds like an awesome one to keeping it interesting and fun. I'm super keen to see how that all works! It's also nice to hear you've got your motivations and story underway too... Is Fish going to act as an antagonist throughout the game? I really hope he's unlikable so the act of kicking his butt is extra enjoyable!!

First of all, thank you so much for this feedback! I was gone from there for a period, rolling in Discord lately in speedrunning and modding of two childhood games that I really like.
1 - Most of real-life inspirations of those cars have near all boxy top perspectives, but I'll do some of my cars a little favor in that regard.
2 - As I said in first post, I'm thinking of light to light and pink slip races primarily. Adding traffic to normal races may be a possiblity, but I still don't know at this point.
3 - I guess my future projects will follow a similar path. Rather than just making levels to race like an ordinary game or and arcade game, I'm taking the sim-arcade-RPG route from now on. I believe this will add a great excitement value to the game, as well as a major replay value. I always liked "upgrade" games where you can gradually upgrade your stats and gain level. It more represents real life than anything else. Regarding that factor; you'll never know when you became eligible to race a turbocharged Pinto!
4 - I've always liked car/racing games, espicially ones with aforomentioned "upgrade" technique. My favourite example is Street Legal Racing Redline in regards that and Street Rod is the ancestor of this style in racing games. Slapping a V8 engine into a compact car is more of my type of car tuning and I've implemented it in this game. But speaking of that, there is a problem in this game: All upgrades go linear, so you'll find yourself spending serious money for tires in a short time. As I found it fitting more into "arcade" part of sim-arcade-RPG trio, I'll let it go for now.
5 - I portrayed Fish as an overpowered douchebag. He is so rich (son of city mayor), so powerful and he drives the fastest car in the game. He probably the one and only antagonist of the game at this point, because all other people you're racing in this game are just innocent racers whose looking for a few bucks.
6 - Those graphics are partly result of my pixel art being inferior. It's not totally noticeable in that screenshot, but as you go to street you can't unsee it