v0.7.5 beta (20.03.24)

If you're a fan of AUTOGRAV, you might enjoy this sneak preview into experimental design and in-progress features on their way to a larger release down the road.

If you're not familiar with AUTOGRAV, you'll probably want to take a peek at the original jam page to get a sense of what the world is all about.

// jacking in 101

 pilots arrive via the onramp to try their hand at the loop

pilots challenge each other to races

 click on pilots or races to interact with them

// quick tips for new players

• If you're looking for a better understanding of the systems in immersive mode, try booting into creative mode. There are tooltips available for much of the data presented on the right half of the screen -- hover your mouse over that text to pull up more info!
• Loop technicality (variety of corners) and size have a big impact on the racing and overall pace of the sim. During track generation, you can hover over corners to inspect their approximate speed limit.

what is this?

AUTOGRAV /mini/ is a minimalist space for me to experiment with upcoming AUTOGRAV features, and to map out end-to-end, high-level gameplay. While AUTOGRAV is and will always be a *3D* sim, working in 2D like this lets me prototype ideas a lot more quickly.

That being said, AUTOGRAV /mini/ isn’t just a testbed — I’ve been looking forward to sharing this since day one. There are some fun goodies I‘m excited for you to try, like my new procedural engine audio simulator. You’ll also find a little taste of the physics worldbuilding I’ve been doing behind the scenes.

I would love to hear your feedback! Most valuable to me is feedback related to overall balance and big picture gameplay flow, as this is what will translate to 3D the most directly. Mini-specific feedback (Like UI quirks) are a bit less helpful but appreciated nonetheless. Most of all, I want to know: what features are you most excited to see in a larger game?

status

• AUTOGRAV /mini/ offers two play modes: creative, which takes place in the outer world, and immersive, which takes place in the inner world (the 'sim'). Both are intended to lean in the direction of a nonlinear sandbox, with inner world gameplay offering a greater number of concrete goals and progression opportunities.
• I'm not interested in gating any of the creative tools, and have mostly been treating creative mode as a big, self-directed toybox (that I also use for content creation). That being said, it's also a useful place to learn about and experiment with the inner world systems, and I think there's a lot of potential for gameplay that threads between both modes (some of which I'm keeping under the rug). There's also something to be said about the terrarium / ant farm angle.
• Immersive mode still needs a lot of fleshing out. Gambling is more of a dominant play style than I would like, as it received more dev hours early on. Management, blade building, and labor archetypes are comparatively underserved. Late game (mature, multi class loops) hasn't seen much love.
• Ultimately, the target experience is a lifesim, and I am invested in providing interesting paths for growth. But it is critical to me that I never sacrifice the passive player or prescribe player roles along the way.
• I’m not opposed to making future content updates, and will likely do so if I think it would inform the larger production ('big' AUTOGRAV). There’s quite a bit I wanted to put in here that didn’t make the deadline! Most of it relates to economy & agent simulation, but there are also plenty of core racing features and physical modeling bits I didn't get around to.

philosophy

AUTOGRAV will always support its original passive, observational mode of play. That’s what got me into this, after all: searching for an iridescent, bristling, qualia-filled, memory garden of a place that grows with or without me. An authentic place just to visit, and be a small part of.

But that's not all AUTOGRAV can offer. I want to expose the creative tools I use in my own place-making to the player. And I'd like to provide additional immersive paths, giving you the opportunity to leave the van to support and engage with the loop, and the pilots within it. AUTOGRAV /mini/ is my first stab at sketching out a little bit what that might look like.

troubleshooting & technical notes

Page zoom appears to cause various text scaling issues. In particular, macOS DPI settings seem to exacerbate this. Ensure your page zoom is at 100% for the best experience. If labels are running outside of UI elements, this is probably your issue.

Your creations are saved for later in local storage. You may have to disable enhanced tracking protection or enable third party cookies in order to get this to work.

Calculating dynomagnetic forces is expensive, and not terribly optimized for the web. If you start chugging, try a different browser. I have found performance in Firefox to be terrible, and performance in Chrome flavored browsers to be pretty decent.

For a significant performance bite, try enabling 'audio quality: high' in settings. This offers the true sound experience as intended, but may result in choppy audio. For a modest performance increase and no sound experience whatsoever, drag the volume slider all the way to the left to save some CPU cycles.

On some older devices, fonts may not load properly. Chrome[ium] seems to work best in these cases. Your 'zero' should have a slash through it, as in (for example):

Although AUTOGRAV /mini/ technically works on mobile, it hasn't really been tested there -- I recommend desktop if possible. Note that UI will begin to fall off the bottom of the screen at low resolutions.