For a while, I'd abandoned this game. After implementing a few different enemies, I decided it was sorta fun, but not really enough to power a whole game by itself, even with the player earning money and buying upgrades. Then, about two months ago,
I took the pseudo-3D shooter concept, rewrote all the code and physics, and twisted it up with a racing game - it won me a couple thousand dollars and quickly got nearly a quarter of a million plays.
Now, a huge portion of those plays are undoubtedly because I had the flashiest, most obnoxious GIF for my cover image (a last-minute improvisation after the beautiful movie-poster style watercolor a dear friend hand painted was in the wrong dimensions, portrait instead of landscape), but there were plenty of other obnoxious GIFs that didn't get nearly the same amount of attention. People are clearly connecting with it: players are getting higher scores than I thought possible, even before GXC highlighted it as a weekly challenge. And quite frankly, it's a blast to play - it would be foolish not to expand it further.
So, Turbo Jetrunner will live on, in the form of a hacking dog, blasting down corpo daemons and racing to the core data, q-drifting past firewalls! I don't have much to show at this point - the above screenshots are from a version that's being discarded, and the jam code is being rewritten from scratch. This post is mostly a desperate bid to keep myself honest about it. Expect updates soon!