Bikepark - A BMX/MTB Game and Park Builder - WIP

Download the alpha now at www.bikeparkgame.com, or read on to learn more about the project!

Hey all,

This is a project I've been working on here and there for a while, mostly for my own enjoyment and to learn Unity and C#, it's a standard BMX game. The video starts off featuring the park editor, which at the moment only has a few objects available, but I'll surely add more as time goes on.

Second part is some riding on the ramp I created with the editor, as you can see the physics are still pretty rough and you can only really do two tricks, but this will change in the future as well.

Keep in mind that it's still in it's early stages, but I would love to hear what everybody thinks and get some feedback!

 

That bike is haunted, it's moving by itself!

Looks neat.

 

Cool ! :d

 

yep, seeing some potential here.

 

Thanks for the replies! I'm working on a character to ride the bike, hopefully that'll be in soon.

 

I haven't had nearly as much time as I would like to work on this project lately, but I've made a short video to show some new features: transform handles to allow click and drag movement, objects now highlight when they are active, and parks can now be saved and loaded. I've also started on getting a hilariously badly animated character in and working on a UI to tie everything together.

Moving forward, I'm planning to add a few more items to the editor and release it as a standalone build in the coming weeks, then I want to get the bike physics and character animations somewhat working and have a playable alpha with the rider and park editor.

I'm totally stumped on what to call this though, it'll probably just be AlexL's Bike Game and Park Builder unless anyone can come up with something better and wouldn't mind me stealing it.

Thanks for looking!

 

A lot of potential right here hope it lives up to the expectations I have for it 5/5 so far

 

Great start. I'll be watching the progress of this..

 

Looks good, I'm working on a similar game but it's more like Trails HD.

 

are you still working on the game?

 

Yeah, although school is eating up most of my time right now, just 3 weeks left!

@iWoundPwn derkoi - Thanks for the comments support!

@Jadunsykes - Good looking models, I'll be watching for it!

Anyways, this week I got grinding working on the park editor block object, although there's no balancing involved yet, it'll just grind until the ledge ends, you hop off or it runs out of speed. I've also been tweaking the GUI a little bit and squashed a couple of bugs.

High up on my to-do list is to put a fence around the level for obvious reasons, but at least now switching between game and editor will respawn the bike. I also hid the character for this video because he was just twitching around like something out of a nightmare.

Enjoy, and please let me know what you think!

 

Hi Alex, I also am developing a bmx game but its more physics based. I would love to know more about how you have gone about this.
What are using for wheel colliders, i'm using sphere colliders because far from perfect due to the shape.
Are you using any connectors or just animations ?
Good to see some other people trying bike games

 

Looks good.

 

Thanks for the replies! I ended up using capsule colliders for my wheels, and in the videos the animations are done by rotating stuff through code, but that's going to change to regular animations for everything, I've got the rider and bike rigged as one now.

I'm planning on posting a new video tomorrow and releasing a playable demo by the end of the week, I'm really looking forward to hearing what people think!

 

why capsule over sphere colliders ? I'm really stuck on this myself have you seen any of my work ?

 

Yeah I think I saw your video on the UDK forum a while back. :]
I ended up using capsule colliders because of the flat bit in the middle, makes it a bit easier to keep the bike upright. If you were going for something more like a sim they probably wouldn't work as well but for my purposes it's good enough.

 

this game has the potential to be a successful game

 

Thanks for the vote of confidence

I've been working on getting the bike looking a bit better, as well as doing animations and coming up with a logo and website. Now that I'm out of school I'll be working on Bikepark full time.

I decided to post a few screenshots so you can see how the game is coming along visually, basically showing the air tricks you can do right now.

Let me know what you think!

 

would love to see a in-game bike customer ,oh and here is a good website for bmx tech and info etc.

http://bmxmuseum.com/

 

Interesting, you your wheels are quite wide to aid with balance ? If so how do you stop them colliding with objects near the wheels ?
Would love to see a video, i'm going to release some more recent vids from my work soon

 

@tapanui - I've got it set up right now so that you can change the colors in game, it just needs a GUI at this point, I'll probably just modify the park editor. I'm planning to add interchangeable parts in the future so that the player can build a wide range of bikes. No licensed parts at this point though.

@LS16BMX - They're just as wide as the tires, and the ends of the capsules come out to the edges of the pegs. If there was an object under the peg that you were trying to pass over it will bump you a little to the side. It only poses a major problem during grinding but I don't use the rigidbody at all while the bike is on a ledge so I just disable the collision. I'll see if I can put a video together showing the colliders.

 

well if you want to add some licensed parts i can ask around, i know a few bike company owners.

 

Yeah that would be neat, plus I would love to get feedback from as many people as possible.

 

P.M me if would like me to ask round the bmx community

 

Been playing with ragdol with my sim, very fun to play but obviously far from complete

 

do you need anyhelp with you're game?

 

Wow nice project! Keep the updates coming!

 

sorry to thread rape, I really do need help with sorting out the wheel collider issues and then I have a fair few other problems also but its all part of the fun

 

@ leoarmstead - Thanks for the offer, but I've got things covered at this point. I'll keep you in mind if I ever need anything in the future!

@skoandi - Thanks . I'm pushing really hard to get a public alpha out, of course everything takes twice as long as you think it will, but I'll try to have a gameplay video before now and then.

@ LS16BMX - I don't really mind, your ragdoll is looking pretty good, it looks like you've got quite a bit of a wobble though. Have you tried setting the center of mass down really low? That should also help to stabilize the bike a little bit.

 

bump

 

Hi Alex, my game is all about feel, how the bike handles in the air and on the ground etc and as such a low CG feels unrealistic. I'm making progress all the time but what i'm doing has never been done before and for good reason haha. Im my view an amination based game will always feel stale and get boring very quickly. You need realtime physics to make it as fun and unpredictable as the real thing IMHO.

 

Yeah, I'm definitely going for something more Dave Mirra's-ey instead of a sim, I've always liked games to be a little more forgiving if not completely realistic.

Anyways, I've got a public alpha available now at www.bikeparkgame.com! Please give it a try and let me know what you think!

I've also got a more recent video which shows some of the new animations somewhat working:

I'm planning to update the alpha on a bi-weekly basis from now on and I'll have screenshots and videos of what I'm doing between releases.

 

hey you should post this in the bmxmuseum forums and see what the bmx community think...

 

can't test it out at work unless you do a mac or web build, from the looks of it seems very jerky side to side, would love to see a scene file. It really confuses me how to add animation and physics to things.

 

I wasn't planning on doing a webplayer build because it would mean that you can't save parks, or maybe you could but it would save it to my server? I dunno, but I can look into it. I know there's a webplayer skiing game that does it by having the user copy and paste text, and since my park files are just plain text it shouldn't be too difficult to do something like that.

I don't have access to a mac for testing, so I can make one but I'll have no idea if it actually works. I will be doing Mac for the final game though.

The animation does some hilarious stuff sometimes, but the jerkiness is probably because I'm setting the animation directly based on inputs without any sort of smoothing, this will have to change as well.

@tapanui - I'm gradually getting threads started on other forums, but I need to get organized a bit better, I just found out today that my Youtube updates were going to an email that I never check so I wasn't responding to comments . Thanks for recommending that site, it seems like a neat little community.

 

Wow looks amazing! Played for 30min I'm really looking forward to updates!

 

Awesome! Thanks for giving it a try.

 

Could you add in the popup box for display settings and resolution, along with the full/windowed modes on? I can't change anything.

 

Yeah, I've updated the download so the launcher should come up now.

 

updates?

 

I've mostly been working on under the hood stuff and bug fixes, plus getting the GUI to scale properly at different resolutions.

 

post some screens or updates pleas!!!

 

Just what I was thinking. What I've been doing this past week doesn't make for very interesting videos or screenshots, but I've been working on a new GUI using 3d controls instead of Unity's system, which I've just decided is too much of a pain to work with, especially getting it to play nice with different resolutions and aspect ratios. When I'm done making all the various controls I need I'll probably bundle them up and put it on the asset store.

I've also started on making the terrain editor work at runtime and I've been setting up the bike editor, and that's basically what the video shows. There's no GUI for the terrain yet which is why my mouse disappears, I'm changing stuff in the inspector, but ATM you can change brush size, strength and squareness.

I think I'm working on too many features at once and my project folder is a mess so I'll probably have to take a few hours to do some cleaning and figure out what I want to focus on and what can be put on the backburner for now.

 

Both these games look super sick and it's cool to see people doing these sorts of projects, and the fact that one game will be more of a simulator and the other more Dave mirra style is so good

 

@Jacob - Thanks for the kind words! Yeah, I think there's definitely a market for both kinds of games, because as much fun as realism can be, everybody wants to do a 1080 double backflip every so often.

 

What if you did like two game modes one realistic one arcade style and the realistic one with like a lower camera angle and the arcade/ Dave mirra style with a higher camera angle

 

Holy Molly, this looks awesome! There seems to be a growing interest in making bmx games here on the Unity forums. Recently I saw a project oriented towards a more physics based simulation in the likes of Skate, and this one seems to be a more traditional arcade approach, which is simply great! As a bmx rider myself, I have to say that this variety in the games is more than what the bmx community could ask for, considering that the last good bmx game that came out was Dave Mirra's freestyle BMX 2 (in my opinion at least). I'll be keeping a close eye on this one!

Now for some constructive criticism. There are two things that pop up at first glance. The size of the rider in comparison to the jump boxes and ramps is a bit big. The stuff around him looks just a tad too small than what to me at least would look well.

The second one, which I think is more important, is that the animations to me look way too fast. BMX riding is about adrenaline and self expression, that's true, but viewing it from the side it's about finesse and the beauty of motion. Seeing as this isn't a first person game, players would probably enjoy more the possibility to observe the motion of the rider and the bike. What could be cooler than seeing the motion of the hands during a bar spin? I see your point with the 1080 double backflip, but the reason people want to do that is because they like how it looks, and they won't be able to enjoy it, if it just flashes in front of them for a brief second, right Not to mention that a trick like that is appealing because it sounds impossibly hard and making the animation slower would probably increase the difficulty of performing it and therefore the satisfaction of managing to perform it. I know this is a tad more abstract perspective, but games like this need to reflect the love of the sport itself I think.

In any case - you are doing a great job so far and I can only admire your dedication to it, considering the other stuff that life throws at you.

Edit - Ah, I didn't notice that a video of the physics based sim project was posted on the second page, sorry about that.

 

@jacob - What I'm working on now is having two control schemes, one with traditional button control combos and one using the analog sticks. The camera angle is also going to be fully editable but I'll definitely include presets. I like the idea of having two physics models, but that's definitely something for the far off future, I need to have one good one before I even think about doing a second.

@NightPatrol - Thanks for the kind words We've been far too long without a good BMX game, I mean yeah I still have my Gamecube hooked up so I can play Dave Mirra 2. The animations are really just placeholders for now, I pretend to be a bit of a jack of all trades but the truth is that I can't animate to save my life. I know an animator who has expressed interest in working with me in the fall though, so hopefully things will look a lot more awesome once he's had a crack at it. The rider is 6 feet tall and everything is scaled to him, but I know sometimes the camera in games can make proportions seem off, so it's something I'll have to experiment with a little bit.

 

Alright, so I've got a new alpha available now at www.bikeparkgame.com. The main change is the addition of a bike editor, as well as a new GUI and some other tweaks. I'm posting my what's new and future goals in this post from the release notes so you can get an idea of it. Sorry for the wall of text

No video for now, I'm taking off for the long weekend but I think I'm going to build a huge park and put something together!

////////////////////////////////////////////////// What's new in version 13.5.16? /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////


Bike editor! Yay! You can now change the colors of most elements of the bike, then save it and it will automatically load with the next time you open the bike editor.

If you're just starting the game, you'll have to go to the bike editor once to load your custom colors onto the in game bike.

Some issues with the bike editor though: You can only change the color of one peg atm, the gyro tabs sometimes don't change color, brake levers and arms don't change color.


There is also supposed to be a moveable camera which I swear works in the editor but doesn't work in a standalone build.
If it somehow works for you, please let me know so I can get it figured out!


I'm in the process of implementing a new GUI, it will offer slightly better performance as well as being easier to set up and customize. It's not perfect yet though, so sometimes sliders might stick or not move properly and you might not be able to get right to the edges of the color picker. The way text input boxes work is that you click on them, hit backspace to get rid of whatever is there, type what you want, then hit enter to confirm it. The GUI on a whole will improve as time goes on.


I've temporarily removed some options in the park editor, you only have 2 sizes of quarter pipes for now, this is because I'm making major changes to the park editor system which will make it much easier to use in the future. You can make poorly modelled dirt jumps though!


Terrain editing isn't ready yet.


Manuals are a bit less buggy.


Ledges and grinding is in now, but it's extremely buggy. If you want the smoothest experience, I would recommend not building ledges at all. But if you're feeling like it, give them a try. They will generally work from at least one direction consistently. They also tend to be more reliable if you don't rotate them at all in the Y axis. You can only double peg and there's no balance but it's something at least. If after a grind the rider is going really slowly or not moving at all, you'll probably have to reset by clicking through to the park editor or bike editor and back to game.


There's buttons now for the rider editor and options, but they don't do anything except pause the game.

The issue where the rider wouldn't go up quarter pipes seems to be fixed. Also, saving and loading parks works differently now, you only have one park that automatically loads, but you still have to hit the save button to save it. If you want to have multiple parks, you have to go into the saves/parks folder and rename them to default park, default park is what will automatically load. The same
holds true for the bike editor.


Note that parks made in the last alpha won't work in this one. I'm really sorry about this, but the save system is constantly evolving, so it should be assumed from now on until I say otherwise that parks made in one version won't work in other ones.


////////////////////////////////////////////////// Goals for the next build: /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////


Improved physics is the top priority now. With better physics, grinding and airing qps should work properly and the game overall will be much better. It's still not going to be a sim, as fun is the top priority, but the physics model has to be more predictable.


A few more tricks as well as two control schemes: classic and modern. Classic will be closer to bmx games of the early 2000s with button combos for tricks, modern will use the right and left sticks to perform tricks and control balance, with the triggers acting as front and rear brakes.


A scoring system and some basic challenges.


Save and load multiple parks, with a gui that will show what files actually exist in the save directory.


Finish the new GUI and make sure that everything works as it should. An options screen would also be nice.


Terrain editing in the park editor, as well as full quarter pipe options (height, slopes, toggle coping, inside and outside corners) and something for dirt jumps. Probably not a full dirt jump editor, but you'll at least be able to change the sizes and maybe the angle of the lip, or make rollers, I dunno, but something cool.


Set colors properly for every element of the bike, as well as choosing to not run brakes or pegs.


User editable camera angle, you'll be able to position the camera anywhere you want it, even simulating first person riding, or you could do a low down fisheye type camera, whatever really.


What I would really like to do with the bike editor is generate bars and frames procedurally, so that you could plug in the geometry and get a frame or bars that looks exactly like a real one. However this is a low priority goal as it's not vital to the game, it would just be really cool.


Get some basic sounds in.


A nice coat of polish on everything so that the game looks a bit more presentable. Including shadows using the Shadow Volumes Toolkit, which is awesome BTW.


At this point I can't really say when the next release will be, but I'll update the current one with minor fixes as I go. I'm getting myself organized and versioning the individual components of the game so that there's no more two steps forward, one step back releases.

 

Thanks for the update! Keep going