Velocity Vortex is a simple arcade 'racing' game that has you charging through traffic on a twisting, looping highway. It was created for Mini Jam 175: Gravity with the limitation of "Constant Motion", and so everything in the game is in constant motion, even the UI.

It was inspired by games like F-Zero GX, Fast RMX, and Sonic Generations, and features adaptive music created by Rein [Spotify]

Controls/How To Play

  • Spacebar - Start/Restart
  • Left Arrow/A - Left Lane
  • Right Arrow/D - Right Lane

Your ship will automatically return to the center lane if neither lane button is pressed. Fly through the rings to gain speed, collect up to three shields to prevent speed loss when rampaging through traffic. Taking damage will result in a total speed loss, try banking some shields before going for the rings. Post your highest score below!

Download

Download
Windows_V1.zip 49 MB

Comments

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Here be my feedback!

Tldr: everything is really solid, great even, but you don't spend enough time at the fun speeds, you are stuck slow for too long, and hit too fast too fast. Also I didn't look at the UI like at all for the most part during gameplay past 300 speed other then to check what speed I was for writing this.


The visuals are very professional for a jam game the ui, assets, textures, and effects are all fantastic. There is very little to say against the quality. What I will say is that the UI is very hard to read at high speeds, it tends to swing around (which looks nice in a diegetic element so for style it is nice) It leads to me ignoring the UI entirely for the most part. Not really that bad since it is not very important and nothing on the UI would influence my choices, since the in-game effects help you understand you have a shield. So while it looks nice it doesn’t help me in the moment to moment, and I could see some people finding it distracting for the UI that you only really care about when things slow down again. A more minimal UI could suffice, since at the high speeds you really need to be locked in. The UI is Great for telling the player “the shield caps at 3 stacks” while you build shield early on, while the game is still slow. This is all to say that the UI as a style element is great, I don’t think it needs to be changed but functionally it is hard to utilize while playing. 

The gameplay was very intuitive since it's pretty simple as well. Picking up on it very fast, the slow build up of speed gives you lots of time to figure out the controls the first time. The movement at first felt very jerky, but it became clear that this is because it needs to be when you hit max speed. Admittedly not an easy problem to fix, since you would want some sort of adaptive lane switch speed based on the current movement speed which might result in inconsistent feeling controls instead. It works great at top speed, but makes the game feel a lot more odd and less natural when at low speeds.

I felt that the build of speed could use a bit of work. 

You start off super slow. 150 is sluggish, great for learning, but starts to feel really painful when you are used to the game and just want to get back speed after you mess up. 250-400 is when it feels pretty nice, not to hard not too easy 400-600 is when it feels great and where you might die if you're too slow. 700 feels like end game tetris where you are designed to lose. Which in a score based game is great actually, means that there will be a cap when you stop and you won't just get bored grinding a infinite score.

These values are kinda good on their own, but from start to finish you get 10 per hoop. Meaning that between 150-250 you're just sluggish till you get 10, then 15 it feels fine, then 20 it feels good, then you often just die instantly. In the 700 ranges I would often need to move all the way to the right and the move speed wasn't enough it felt (that or my reaction time is just bad which maybe), Plus at the speed somethings just seeing the future hoops is hard with the camera angle.

Imo what might help a lot with this feeling would be the speed up decreasing overtime (the scoring can stay linear). So from the numbers could hypothetically be: 150 - 300 it goes up 30 per hoop. 300 - 500 can be 20 per loop.

500 can be 5 per hoop. You'll stay in the sweet hard zone longer, stay out of the sluggish zone for too long, and still hit the “death zone”. This would probably be my biggest suggestion. 

There is not too much else to say since everything is really solid, the feel, visuals, music, and gameplay are all really good. Just feels like the “fun speed” only lasts for a short time, while the slow parts or the too fast parts last longer. That's my thoughts! Really fantastic entry, the above is just my thoughts spoken without much consideration for “its a jam game” so I understand that a lot of this is just “there wasn't time” since there never really is hehe and what you have here is great work!

Did also find a bug where I was invincible at 1k speed so I guess my final score was infinity hehe

The build was updated to address most of the feedback received so far. Thank you for your kind words and I'm glad you enjoyed it!