Free Neon Run 🚲 - Opera GXC Update


Updated!
For the launch of Neon Run on Opera GXC, I've updated a fair number of the graphics and changed the soundtrack to original compositions (by me)! It's the definitive edition! Show who's the most agile Neonite by playing against others in the Challenges:
Features
  • Online leaderboard (with separate leaderboards for each difficulty)
  • Multiple difficulty levels (I recommend playing on Hard)
  • Re-bindable keys
  • Plenty of settings to turn the eye candy up or down (in case a player has an aversion to flashing lights or that sort of thing)
  • In-game tutorial
  • A wicked amount of fun
Thrill-seeking has a long and gloried history, but nothing yet has straddled the line between thrilling and insanity quite so delicately as the Neon Run! Grab yourself a Laserbike and take a ride along the plasma platforms that cover the highrise skylines of Old New New York. Make daring leaps, dodge deadly energy beams and zip ahead with speed boosts, all to claim the glory of the fastest Neonite on the Neon Run. Are you quick enough to top the Neon Run?




The further you get on the Neon Run without dying, the higher your score will be. Get the highest score you can and see how your skills fare against all the other Neonites playing through the Leaderboard!

There's a tutorial in-game for you to learn the ins and outs of how to race on the Neon Run.

Soundtrack available on SoundCloud.

Controls (These are customizable in-game):

1Change Laserbike colour to RED
2Change Laserbike colour to GREEN
3Change Laserbike colour to BLUE
SpacePull a sick jump on your Laserbike

Play it here on itch.io (older version)!
And here on Opera GXC!
 
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Minor update released that allows you to view the leaderboard (and your ranking) as well as all the detailed stats about your best run by clicking a button on the title screen rather than having to play a run to see the info. Worth downloading the new version if you're a leaderboard junkie (or just wanna see the stats on your best run).
 
It's all shader code. First I draw only the intense colours from the scene to a surface using a shader, then I ping pong back and forth between two other surfaces, blurring the intense colour surface horizontally and vertically alternately with a shader (the number of times this happens determines how large the glow effect is, adjustable in the options of the game), then finally the blurred surface is drawn back on top of the application surface using a shader that does some maths to figure out how each pixel should be lit according to a combination of both surfaces.

Tbh, learning lighting effects with shaders was pretty much the only reason I entered the jam. I've been putting off really diving into shaders for a loooong time, and I need to come to grips with them for the lighting effects for Alchementalist. So the jam gave me a hard deadline and a reason to actually start the work of figuring them out.

@Amon
 
Lol, I have a little tale to tell that I can't keep to myself.

So I tested the game thoroughly and everything worked great, no bugs nosiree. I uploaded the game and submitted it with a few days to spare and a few people played it and the promise of each coming day seemed brighter than before, the air smelt cleaner and life was good. No bugs happened. Then I upgraded GMS to the latest beta version (I generally don't upgrade mid-project). A day later, I made a small QOL change, bug-checked the change, and uploaded the new version without thinking anything of it.

However, I'd secretly added a ticking time bomb for everyone who downloaded it after this.

You see, the beta version of GMS I upgraded to had a bug to do with the YYC compiler and global variables combined with array positions in arrays stored in structs (see here if you are interested in what the bug was). This meant that once you'd finished a race the game would always crash. The deadline for submission came and went while I was sleeping the peaceful sleep of the just and then I woke up to a comment pointing out the crash. I was confused and spent ages tracking down what was going on until finally, I got confirmation from Yoyo that it was indeed a bug in GMS itself.

So I raged into the void, Yoyo themselves, alongside my carelessness about not testing everything thoroughly after a minor change had apparently doomed my submission to crash with no recourse. Until I saw this:
Happy to let little edits slide!
So yeah, I uploaded a new version with the minor change I needed to make it all work as it did before. A little bit sad that all the ratings I got were during the Dark Age of The Bugâ„¢, but happy that I could work around it and submit the fixed version of the project.
 

EndMark

Member
Here's the post-mortem I wrote up with my experiences in the Amaze Me Jam: Amaze Me Game Jam Post-Mortem for Neon Run
Thanks for sharing such a detailed post-mortem! I would love to know where to get started with online leaderboards in GMS2 if you’d be kind enough to point me in the right direction.

I just finished VimJam2. It’s only my second jam entry, and first to make deadline with a working build! I was proud enough of that, but my game ChonkyBam has the most ratings by any solo dev and the third most of all games. I’m doing some updates this week before the scores are revealed Monday (I may have just received a lot of bad ratings!). A lot of changes I’m making are simple and things I’m kicking myself for not thinking of when first making it. But my biggest ambition is to put an online leaderboard in game, even if that’s a second update I do further down the line.

I appreciate your help and guidance. Thank you.
 
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